Wednesday, November 27, 2013

like pea soup

When we woke up on Sunday, we immediately checked Alta's webcams, noting with ski-snob-dom that it was all socked in with clouds up there.  So we puttered around for the morning, lingering over breakfast and periodically checked the webcams.  At 10:45 a.m., the clouds broke to reveal blue skies and sunshine.  We threw on our ski stuff, jumped in the truck and headed up Little Cottonwood Canyon to Alta ... where the clouds had moved back in and were seemingly getting lower by the minute.

Foggy!

We were already up there, though, so we thought we might as well take some runs, flat light be damned.  The snow - old snow, nothing new yet - was softer than it had been the day before, and that was nice, almost spring skiing conditions.  We went up Collins and over the ridge to Sugarloaf where it was really tough visibility.  On the chairlift, we could see the chair in front of us but no further; down on the runs, it was extremely disconcerting to be skiing without really seeing.  I was grateful that it wasn't crowded so that we didn't have to dodge other skiers.

Floating in a sea of white

We shifted to ski off the Collins chair after a while, and after stopping in for a snack at Watson's Shelter.  The snow was holding up amazingly well, given how little there is.  There were a few small stones floating around on some of the runs but we didn't ding our skis too badly.  Towards the end of the day, we even ventured off-piste a bit when H found a snow-filled gully.  It was bumped up just slightly - and I quickly realized that it was WAY too early in the season for my poor legs to be doing ANY bumps, soft or not.  That's okay.  I'll get there.

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