rockin' the locker

 We have totally scored at Alta this season: the sister of one of our neighbor's is subletting her Goldminer's Daughter ski locker to us.  There are a fair number of ski lockers up at Alta, both in the GMD basement and in the skier services building, but the waitlist for them is over ten years long, and we've heard that they don't even bother adding new names to the list anymore - people just don't give them up.  So when this locker was offered to us, we were all YES YES WE WANT IT OF COURSE THANK YOU!

As I mentioned, it's in the GMD basement, a slightly damp space completely lined with sticker-encrusted lockers, with wooden benches and tables and a pervasive sense of you're local now.  The lockers are long and narrow, with enough room for our two pairs of skis and poles but not wide enough to stuff our boot bags into.  It has, therefore, turned into a bit of planes-trains-and-automobiles to go skiing: we drive from our house to the bus (7 a.m.); ride the bus to Alta's Wildcat base (arrive 7:50); go to the locker, change into our boots and grab our skis and poles; ride the rope tow with our boot bags (because the next inter-resort shuttle is about a half hour away) up to the Albion day lodge where there's room for us to sit and free cubbies for our boot bags; and wait for the lifts to open at 9:15.  Is it kind of ridiculous?  Yes.  But we don't have to wrangle our skis and poles on the crowded ski bus for the whole season and that is just excellent.

Lo and behold

It was warmer but less sunny on Sunday.  I went skiing too.  It wasn't that crowded and the snow was really quite good for early season, but I struggled mightily.  I was way overdressed because it wasn't as cloudy or as windy as the forecast had said.  And I think I was a little dehydrated.  And my legs are not at all in shape after the dearth of hiking this year (note to self: don't sprain your ankle again) - I had to go in and rest!  The most amusing part of the whole thing was that because I was wearing my big, super-warm parka, H kept not recognizing me: two separate times I followed right behind him in the singles line, but he didn't realize it was me and didn't wait at the top like he usually does.  When I finally got his attention, I suggested that we ski separately for the last two hours (so I could go at my own, very slow pace) and just meet up at the GMD a little after 2 p.m.  So that's what we did, and we rode the bus back down, ski- and pole-free and it was glorious.