new year's day 2012

Happy New Year, y'all!  Since the conditions weren't all that fabulous on NYE, and we didn't get any new snow overnight, we didn't find it necessary to get up at the crack of early and hit the slopes.  Instead, H made us a tasty breakfast of (leftover) steak and scrambled eggs and we took our time getting up to Alta, arriving well before 10 a.m. but well after the 9:15 first chair.  We were pleased that it was oodles warmer than the day before, with little to no wind, temperatures in the mid-20s and no clouds.  No crowds either - there were lots fewer people out, whether due to church, too late partying the night before or the fact that the conditions were going from pretty bad to worse.

I sound like a broken record but Alta needs snow so badly.  I may bust on the skiing back east but if there's one thing Maine resorts know how to do, it's to make poor conditions as good as possible.  We used to ski at Sunday River in Bethel, Maine, and the snowmakers and the cat-drivers would work absolute magic on the trails, grooming deep and giving the skiers at least three hours of skiable trails before the snow would get scraped off.  Not so much at Alta, probably because in normal winters, with hundreds of inches of snow by now, it isn't needed.  But Alta is no longer making snow for some reason (possibly scarcity of water?) and they just don't groom very well.  We did a couple of runs off the Supreme chair (which kept breaking down so that was annoying) and they had only bothered to regroom one of the two trails that they've been grooming up 'til now, leaving Rock-n-Roll a rutted mess.  It's not like the snow-cats are busy grooming other trails - they should have gone over that one.  The groomed trails under Sugarloaf were holding up better, except for Sugarbowl which everyone skis slides down once they get off the lift; Collins wasn't the nightmare that it had been on Saturday but it was still rock-hard and terrible.  We called it quits before lunchtime: despite the nice temperatures it just wasn't that fun, plus we don't want to risk getting injured by out-of-control skiers who don't know how to ski on that stuff.

There's no snow in the days to come either: that dang bowl of high pressure is just stuck out there over the Pacific Ocean.  I of course want to go skiing and I love Alta - I really, really do - but if we're not going to get any natural anytime soon, they are going to have to work the trails more to make what they've got skiable.  I don't know, maybe I'll go for a hike on the Monday holiday instead: there's certainly no snow on the south-facing hillsides.