far from the madding crowd

Fearing the holiday crowds in Little Cottonwood Canyon, we went to Solitude on Monday.  I took my trusty Volkls, knowing that there hadn't been any additional snowfall since the "storm" moved out Sunday afternoon.  That ended up being a very good choice, ski-wise, as the choice of trails pretty much came down to groomers or ginormous moguls.  Since a lot of people don't like moguls, the groomers got skied off quickly.  That meant that H and I skied a lot of bumps - I'm not sure I've ever skied so many bumps.  Luckily it was sunny in the morning and fairly warm, so any moguls that were in the sunshine for any length of time got soft-ish.  That helped, but for the most part the bumps were so big that I had a tough time finding any rhythm and just wound up skiing over or around them.

H in Honeycomb Canyon

We had noticed that the Sol-Bright trail was open, which I don't think it ever had been on prior trips to Solitude.  Even though we could tell from the map that the trail was just a flat run-around the border of the resort, we figured we'd have to try it.  Access is from the top of the little Summit double chair and the trail skirts the Solitude/Brighton boundary.  It started off well-traveled, but once we got around the end of the ridge, most of the tracks seemed to dive down a hollow towards Brighton while a few hardy souls had stayed high, skirting the ridge.  Since we didn't want to get stuck in Brighton, we stayed high ... until we ran into a bunch of cliffs.  The good thing about the cliffs was that we were high enough to see that the trail did in fact bypass Brighton and Silver Lake and headed back to Solitude, so we picked our way down the hill and rejoined the trail.  The end of Sol-Bright, before it segues with the trails under the Sunrise lift, is slightly uphill through a gorgeous aspen grove: you had to skate a bit but at least it was pretty.

Taking a break along the traverse

As if that cross-country workout wasn't enough, we went back to the Summit chair and then hiked up the traverse into Honeycomb Canyon.  I'm not sure how far we slogged - it felt like forever - but we made it in far enough to find actual untracked snow.  There were a couple of young (and very polite) snowboarders up on the traverse with us and when H dove off and started spraying up powder on his turns, the 'boarders were all, "All right!"  We each got about six turns' worth of day-old freshies and it was good indeed.