penultimate ski day, 2017

Even though in years past Alta has had their "closing day" and then re-opened for one more weekend after that, this season it seems that closing day is really going to be closing day.  Sigh.  It's a good thing that the weekend turned out so nice.

Saturday was mostly sunny but pretty cold to start: 18 F in the morning, warming to low 40s.  My toes got very cold - because for some reason I refused to wear my boot covers, even though it was only 18 F.  And despite the bright sunshine, with the cold temperatures the snow didn't soften until well after noon, and it was set up hard and scratchy at the start.  We went straight to Sugarloaf, hoping for slightly softer snow, and skied there for most of the morning.  H was on his alpine skis and looking to score lots of vertical feet in his 1,000,000 vertical feet/season quest; since I couldn't keep up with him, I went to Supreme after a while, putting in five runs there before heading in for lunch.

Sunny day selfie

After lunch we skied Supreme together for quite a while then did a couple on the front side, riding both Collins and Wildcat.  While Sugarloaf and Supreme had softened nicely at that point, Collins was still a little firm.  Because of the cold temperatures in the morning, however, when the snow did finally soften, it didn't get sticky - which was fantastic.

Also fantastic: there was no one there!  We never waited in any lift lines; we rode up just the two of us in the chair more often than not; and although the Wildcat base parking lot filled up at midday, by the time we [downed a couple of beers on the patio and] headed down canyon, it was already emptying out.  Seems like people have moved on from skiing - but not us.  There's still one day to go.