10" + no crowds = awesome day at alta

It started snowing Friday afternoon and kept going all through the night and into the morning, leaving four inches of snow in our driveway for H to shovel - and ten inches up at Alta.  Temperatures were pretty mild (low 20s at the base, high teens at the summit) and that, coupled with all the new fresh, made me think that it was going to be crowded.  I was wrong.  There was a substantial group waiting for the chair to open at Collins, but once that dissipated, we never had to stand in line.  I guess people just don't like to ski when it's snowing.  But we do!

We headed straight to the Supreme chair and skied there for most of the day.  It was SO GOOD.  The snow was much lighter and fluffier than it had been the Sunday before, easy to turn in and soft to fall in.  I was skiing my powder skis so much better than last time:  I felt good, surfing my wide Rossignols up and through the billows of snow, and H even said that I looked like I knew what I was doing.

Over and over and over again we hiked up to the traverse into Catherine's Area (the slog has got to get easier at some point), did the work to get in there, and then delighted in the wonderful, untracked powder.  And we kept finding freshies all day, tucked into chutes and trees, deep well to our knees.  It was just awesome and so much fun.  For our last couple of runs, we moved to East Greeley.  It was largely tracked out but still so soft and deep, and the chutes that brought us back to the Sugarloaf chair were lots of fun.

We made it until about 2:30 p.m., then headed carefully down the canyon.  The traffic wasn't bad at all despite the many cars lining the canyon road at Snowbird - apparently that's where all the crowds were.  We got home safely, hung up our wet stuff to dry and toasted with some hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps, looking out the window at Little Cottonwood Canyon, some wicked pleased to see the snow clouds wedged in there.  Tomorrow was shaping up to be another great day.