midweek skiing

We had a couple of nice storms move through in the last week, leaving about 47 new inches of snow up in the mountains.  We didn't ski on Christmas, however, what with being sick, and then various circumstances stacked up to keep us off the hill that weekend.  H finally felt like skiing on Tuesday, but it was super-windy and super-cold (windchill of -26F) and he only stayed out for a couple of hours, reporting that his skis were quite sticky since the wax on them wasn't right for the cold temperatures.  He went back out on Wednesday with better results.  It was cold, but not as cold as Tuesday, and not as windy.  It didn't get busy until after lunch and he skied Supreme for most of the day.

New Year's Day we both went skiing.  I was looking forward to it since I hadn't been since the weekend before Christmas.  It was clear and chilly, 10F at the base at the start.  I found it surprising that there were hardly any cars in the lot when we rolled in at 9 a.m., but I guess most of the hardcore locals wouldn't be jonesing for runs since it hadn't snowed since Monday.  As we rode our first chair out of Collins, we watched a big, fluffy coyote running right down the middle of Collins Face, before swerving skier's left into the lower Wildcat woods.  We see coyote tracks up at Alta all the time but have never seen an actual coyote.  So cool.  I've decided that he was a good omen for 2015.

The Backside is open!

We did a couple of runs on Sugarloaf before heading over to Supreme.  The snow was soft but well-packed (although fluffy if you could find anything untracked) and skied-out, and the grooming crew had done a pretty good job, no doubt with all the vacationing tourists in mind.  Those storms had filled in a lot of the gaps and covered lots of rocks ... although not all of them, which H discovered in a hopeful run through the trees between No. 9 Express and Upper Sleepy Hollow.  Catherine's Area was in pretty good shape (skied out) and we did several runs in there.  My legs were definitely feeling like I hadn't been skiing for a while, but it was such a gorgeous day I didn't care.

Lunch was early so as to avoid the rush and then we were back out at it, including a couple of runs through East Greeley.  For it being vacation, it never got all that crowded but there was plenty of cluelessness.  A couple of doofuses in line at Supreme were talking about another guy's "telemarketer" skis.  Large groups of people were stopped in particularly inopportune places (middle of the cat track) for photos or map reading.  A guy ran me off the edge of the cat track atop Supreme because he was making turns (on a nearly flat cat track) and had no sense of where he was in space.  Sigh.  They'll be gone soon enough.