cloudy, with a chance of skiing

After the storm rolled out at the end of last weekend, we entered into a period of calm weather-wise.  When we headed up to Alta on Saturday (our passes worked on the bus - yay ski bus!), the forecast was for high 20s/low 30s and mostly cloudy.  For once, I got my layers right - partial down jacket - and was comfortable for the whole day.  Woohoo!

 Low clouds creeping up the canyon

It was not nearly as crowded as it had been the weekend before, and we suspected that the flat light and dearth of new snow kept people down in the valley with their Christmas shopping.  Those of us who were up there, however, very much appreciated the lack of lift lines and I thought the conditions were quite good, all things considered.  Although off-piste was a little thin (a fact that H confirmed on a run down Extrovert later in the day), the groomers were creamy.

View from Razorback

We did five runs on Collins, then moved over to Supreme, which was now open. There were people flooding into Catherine's Area but we opted not to go quite yet, hoping to protect what's left of our ski bases.  It was quite different from last year at this time, when Supreme wasn't open and they were loading the Sugarloaf lift every other chair, trying to keep the few trails from becoming too crowded.
On this day, Sugarloaf was in decent shape.  We found some nice small and soft-ish bumps on Razorback, which definitely let my early season legs know that there's still work to be done before I can be considered to be in any sort of shape.

We skied until after 2 p.m., then had a beer downstairs at the Goldminer's Daughter lodge before catching the 3:04 bus that was both late and SUPER busy for some reason.  But our passes worked and we got seats, and Milton did fine home alone all day, so you'll hear no real complaints from us on that front.