ski guests day 3: alta

Saturday was an interesting day, to say the least.  W met the rest of us up at Alta, where things had set up HARD overnight after the extremely warm day before.  We all decided that Supreme would be the place to start out because we could go in through the gates and ski in the trees where the snow might have survived better.  As we headed towards the gates, however, the snow had not so much survived: Challenger was a slick of Eastern-style ice, like you get on Quantum Leap at Sunday River.  It was the first real ice I've seen out here in Utah, and boy - have I forgotten how to ski on it.  H and the three Mainers skated down over it without blinking; I was actually snowplowing in places.  It was awful.

Once we got in through the gates towards White Squaw Area and surrounds, it wasn't quite as bad.  The bumps were very hard but loose snow had accumulated in the valleys between and it was skiable.  We did several runs there and other places off the Supreme lift, seeking out as much snow as we could find.

After lunch, it started snowing and it started snowing hard, stacking up quickly.  This made the conditions much better very quickly.  We skied off the Collins lift for the rest of the afternoon - Racecourse, Sunspot, Spruces, Fred's Spot - and the snow kept getting better with every run.  There was a little bit of excitement when we hit some thundersnow - thunder and lightning in a snowstorm - which happened while W, A and I were on the lift; C and H were lined up to load a few chairs behind us but the lifties wouldn't let anyone else on, and once we got to the top of Collins, the lift shut down for 20 minutes to make sure the thunder had moved on.

Yay! It's snowing!

They restarted the lifts and we got several more runs in before the thunder rang out again.  It was late enough at that point that we called it a day and met W's wife for a quick drink in the Goldminer's Daughter lodge.  It was still snowing like crazy, so we didn't linger too long, concerned about the roads.  We did stay long enough to convince W to change his flight home until Monday so that he could ski with us again on Sunday: the storm was forecast to keep on all night and all the next day, and we sensed epic powder just around the corner.  After the ice that morning, we figured we were due.