slight snowfall

We got a nice little storm midweek that left a foot of snow in the mountains and several inches in the valley, and then another smaller system moved in and gave us a few more inches over the weekend.  It's not ideal, and it's not enough, but it definitely improved our Saturday skiing over what we had last weekend as far as conditions underfoot went.

We scraped the storage wax off our powder skis - although Saturday wasn't a "powder day" by any stretch of the imagination, there was enough new snow that the wider boards would be better than our East Coast carvers - and headed up to Alta.  The parking lot was pretty empty upon our arrival but would fill up during the day even though there were never any lift lines.

We rode up Collins and slipped over the ridge to the Sugarloaf side, noticing that skiing was silent on top of the soft new snow.  The Sugarloaf chair wasn't running for some reason so we went over to Supreme immediately.  It was precipitating strangely for the first couple of runs and our goggles actually iced over.  Luckily, the precipitation changed to regular snow (although not much of it) and the icing-up stopped.  We did a couple of runs in Catherine's Area, which were much better than last weekend, even finding a couple of stashes of untracked snow way in there.  Coverage is still not great and we had to watch for rocks lurking under the surface.

All bundled up against the weather

The clouds kept descending as the day wore on and the light was very flat.  Sugarloaf chair got up and running and we did some runs there too when they closed the Supreme chair for avalanche control.  The EBT was closed too so we had to take the rope tow back across to Collins when we wanted to do some runs on the front side.  The snow had not held up quite so well there, being a little more skied off in spots.

My legs, which fight against those wider, longer Rossignols, trying to force them to do tiny turns until my brain realizes that no, these skis are not made for tiny turns, called it quits around 2:15 p.m.  People were still rolling in as we left.  We figured that holiday week visitors would be arriving on Saturday to ski in earnest starting Sunday.  It's always busy over Christmas week - it sure would be nice if we could get some more snow for those folks.  (And us.  We like new snow too.)