new snow saturday

To the delight of all (who like winter), it started to snow Friday evening.  It stacked up quickly down in the valley: by Saturday morning we had gotten close to eleven inches and we saw reports of 20" on the Draper benches.  This got everyone's engines revving, of course, and the ski bus was busy, standing room only.  We were somewhat dismayed to see, upon our arrival at Alta, that they had only gotten six inches overnight.  The corral was already full and cars were pouring into the parking lot.  All that for just six inches?  Since it was still snowing, we waited in the lodge until the lift line started to move and even once we got out there, decided against skiing on Collins because the lines were just so long.

Ski Patrol had signs like this at every lift

The conditions were okay but not great, but skiers have been starved for snow and are willing to take whatever there is at this point.  As you can see from the photo, ski patrol was concerned that the new snow would make people forget that there are still a LOT of rocks around at Alta.  Any high traffic areas got scraped off and bumped up quickly so the snow was better in less popular areas.  This was H's first time on his new NTN telemark set-up and it took him a little while to get used to it.  For me, my wider Rossignols went through the puffs well even though I still tend to get owned by those skis when I have to turn quickly (or a lot). We did laps on Sugarloaf and Supreme, switching from one to the other if the lines ever got long - which they never really did, given the amount of cars parked in the lots and along the road.

When everything got thoroughly tracked out, we stopped in at the Goldminer's Daughter Saloon for a couple of beers.  Our intention was to catch the 4:04 p.m. bus down the canyon.  Our plans were thwarted somewhat when we had to wait for an hour for our bus to show up.  Then the trip down was very, very slow due to the heavy down-canyon traffic: the dreaded "red snake" of taillights inching its way back to the valley.  We finally got home at 7:30 p.m., making it a solid twelve-hour day.  It was still snowing, however, which we thought might bode well for Sunday.