a tale of two weathers

 Northern Utah got a nice series of storms throughout the week that brought mostly rain to the Salt Lake Valley (and lemme tell ya, by Thursday we were desparate to see the sun) and over 50" of new snow to Alta.  Last I checked, their snow total was 362" on the season which is definitely respectable.  As that system moved out, however, cold weather moved in.  With cloudy skies and a forecasted high of 9F for Alta, there was no way I was going skiing on Saturday.

H went, of course, grabbing the 6:30 a.m. bus - and being thankful for it later when he read that the 7 a.m. bus was full after leaving the very first stop (the one before ours).  It was cold and cloudy, spitting snow off and on, but the conditions were really quite good.  While he did that, Milton and I did a four mile walk, dealt with two loads of laundry, changed bed sheets and vacuumed and made chocolate chip cookies and chili.  (Then H and I went and socialized, as previously discussed.  It was a busy day.)

Sunday was to be still cold but warmer, plus sunny, so I charged up my battery-powered socks and was with H on the 6:30 bus.  We both wore our warmest parkas as it was 20F at the base when the lifts opened, colder at the summit and frigid-feeling in the shade.  We immediately went to the Sugarloaf lift because that one is almost 100% in the sun, even first thing in the morning.  Lots of other people had that idea too and there was a noticable lift line before 10 (as opposed to the line not showing up until 10:30 on Saturday).  That was okay, though, because the sun was strong and the snow was pretty good - all skied out, of course, but a nice combination of soft and/or chalky.  As we did laps there, we could see ski patrol hiking out into Devil's Castle; soon enough lots and lots of explosions shook the mountains from the avalanche control work.

You can just see that cloud coming up the canyon

After Sugarloaf we switched to Supreme for a while.  It was busy enough that we exclusively rode the singles lines on all the lifts.  The lifties were doing a good job, though, so it never seemed like we waited all that long.  By 11:45 my heated socks - which are very thick - were squeezing my toes too much.  I proposed that we move to Collins: I went to change into different socks and then we just skied the front side until it was time to catch our bus home.

It was an absolutely stunning day, with as much sunshine as you could want (we need to start remembering sunscreen) until about 2 p.m.  As we rode the bus down Little Cottonwood Canyon, this weird cloud was working its way up - it wasn't an inversion-y mess of smog, just a stray cloud - and it looked like the nice warm (30F) sunshine was done for the day.  That was okay.  We were done too.