big change

High pressure settled in during the rest of the week, keeping temperatures cold in Salt Lake Valley and warmer up in the mountains, with no new snow.  The next weather system was due to move into the area Saturday night which meant that skiing on Saturday was way different than skiing on Tuesday: it was at least twenty degrees warmer and the increasing clouds meant flat light.  It wasn't very crowded and we took five runs on Collins to start, only having to share chairs with strangers a couple of times. 

The snow was firm but not frozen on the groomers; off-piste was weird in that it wasn't hard but it felt tough, scoured by the winds into shapes that, were it to warm up and freeze over, would be awful to ski on.  As it was, the best snow of the day was found on the bottom third of Extrovert, with soft-ish and smallish bumps.  We got there by skiing the top of Rollercoaster, crossing through the trees of Amen and climbing out of the gully under the lift towers.  While skiing the Sugarloaf chair, we also did a Razorback/Cabin Run combination and found rocks surfacing on Razorback that had been successfully covered just days before.

Supreme had very little lift line for most of the day so we spent some time there.  East Castle was open - somewhat surprisingly, because the coverage looked a little thin from where we were standing - and while we didn't do the hike up in there ourselves, we did go into the trees beneath it three times, twice from the high gate at the end of the cat track from the top of Supreme and once from the low gate at the end of Rock N Roll.  The ungroomed snow was pretty heavy and it was safer to follow previous skiers' tracks to avoid wrenching a knee.

Supreme chair selfie

We finished up with a couple of runs back on Collins.  Since the base temperature was around 40 F (!!), I had hoped the snow would have softened.  It hadn't, or not as much as I had imagined, and the light was really, really flat, so we wrapped things up and caught the 2:30 p.m. bus home.