a day for the powder skis

As promised, it kept snowing up in the canyons overnight, dropping a storm total of 25" up at Alta.  That much new snow on top of the nasty old snow brought some serious issues, however, like an avalanche slide right across Little Cottonwood Canyon Road.  At about 7:30 a.m., H checked the canyon alerts and learned that the LCC road wasn't going to be open until 10:30 a.m. at the earliest and that cars were prohibited from attempting to stage on the road (we're guessing that "staging" means idling in the lane while waiting for the canyon to open).  We weren't about to miss out on the new powder, however, so we quickly swapped out our Alta season passes for the Solitude $45/day 5-Paks we'd bought (at my genius suggestion, btw) this fall with the intention of using on days when LCC was closed.  Today was the perfect day to break them in, seeing how Solitude was reporting 27" from the storm.  Away we went, up Big Cottonwood Canyon!

Honeycomb Canyon (not open),

from the top of the Summit lift

We were not the only people with that idea: I have never, ever seen Solitude so crowded.  At 9:20 a.m., when we got up there, there was a long line at the ticket window, which we noted as we smugly skied up to the lift with our passes; and there were huge lift lines at all the lifts nearly all day.  Despite the lines - which were really only because the lifties didn't bother to set up any corrals so it was a free-for-all trying to get through the gates - we truly didn't stand in line for much more than five minutes ever.  It's just such a change from Solitude's usual ... solitude.

At 1:00 p.m., H got another canyon alert email:

Big Cottonwood Status: Open
Little Cottonwood Status: Closed Jan22:  Solitude and Brighton parking lots are full. Please use UTA.    Est. open for  Snowbird only is 11:30am.  -CanyonAlerts.org

At 1:30 p.m., he got yet another one:

Big Cottonwood Status: Open
Little Cottonwood Status: Restricted Jan22:  Little Cottonwood Canyon Rd. is now open to Snowbird only. Alta's Est. open time is 12:30 pm.  -CanyonAlerts.org

Meanwhile, we were having an absolute blast skiing in deep powder for the first time all season.  We skied all over the mountain, starting at the Eagle lift, moving to Sunrise, heading back to Powderhorn and then, finally, sprinting for the Summit lift when ski patrol finally opened it around 12:30 p.m.  By then the rest of the resort was pretty bumped up and tracked out, but over off the little Summit double chair we found plenty of deep, untracked powder in the trees and chutes.  It was most excellent, easily outdoing Saturday's ski-in-a-storm for best day of the year (so far).