worth the wait

Snow, snow, snow!  It started snowing Friday afternoon and by Saturday morning, we even had over six inches at our house.  This meant about 32 inches* of powder, high avalanche danger and road closure in Little Cottonwood Canyon.  We left the house at 8:30 a.m., fretted and fumed at the selfish drivers in line ahead of us, and made it to Alta's parking lot around 10:15 a.m.  (We were clever enough to bring books with us this time for the stretches of sitting.)   They were still patrolling Supreme and delayed the opening of the lift for a while so we took a couple of runs off Sugarloaf until we couldn't stand it anymore.

We joined the corral at Supreme, waiting for them to open the chair while more snow fell around us.  People were pretty patient for the most part.  I took advantage of the wait to break out my powder cords (neon orange strings that you attach to your skis, and then stuff the trailing edge up into your ski pants - then, when you lose a ski in the deep snow, the string unfurls and you can follow it to your buried ski).  We stood in the corral for about twenty minutes and then, hallelujah!, they opened the lift.  We were on the twelfth chair and rode up with a tele skier who was all but drooling at the fresh snow.  As we neared the top of the lift, we could hear whoops and hollers of pure joy as the skiers headed off into the crazy powder, well over my knees.  After our first Supreme run, we skied right back onto the lift; after our second, the corral was jam-packed.  No worries, we just rode the singles line. 

After our lunch break, we decided to head to Collins base and ski the Wildcat chair for a while.  Since the EBT traverse trail was closed for avalanche control, we had to ski down to the tow rope for it to drag us back to Collins.  As we started down the bunny slope to Albion, we had to pause to let that huge porcupine cross the trail.  He's enormous and entirely unconcerned with the people taking pictures of him, walking steadily in a straight line across the ski trail to a stand of trees.  H got a photo this time:

Cecret Lift's resident porcupine, out for a stroll

We did a couple of runs at Wildcat - ridiculous amounts of snow in there - before my poor legs said they'd had enough.  It was 3:30 p.m. by then, though, and even although we'd had a late start, we felt we'd had plenty of fun in the powder.  Pluswhich, there's always tomorrow!

*  It snowed all day on Saturday, tapering off in the evening, and adding a few more inches so that the storm total for Alta was 37".  Not too shabby.