variable

 In my current, "I only want to ski when the sun shines" era, I had been eying the upcoming weekend forecast with trepidation: Saturday 19-30 F with 3-5 inches of snow, windy and possibility of thundersnow; Sunday high of 25 F with 1-3 inches.  That's not what I think of when I think of spring skiing.  So I checked my work schedule and was able to play hooky on Thursday, with the plan to work on Saturday so as not to burn a vacation day.  Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday would have been ideal, with Alta sporting warm temperatures and bluebird skies, but Thursday was what I was able to come up with.  The forecasts were all over the place but they all averaged out to fairly warm, snow showers either early or late but not much accumulation, possibly windy.

You don't have to have parking reservations Monday through Thursday, and since there wasn't supposed to be much snow I opted to drive up instead of taking the bus.  I invited H to join me but he had some work stuff he couldn't get out of.  So I slept in until 7 (!), got up and walked Milton, had avocado toast and coffee for breakfast and rolled on out in my little Subaru around 8:20 a.m.  It took me twenty minutes to get up there and they parked me in the second row, just five cars in.  Decadent!  I got the locker opened on the first try, chatted with some of the regular locals in the locker room and then headed up to ski.

It had just barely been sprinkling/spitting snow when I drove past Snowbird but by the time I was walking to the lift line at Collins, it had graduated to snowing.  Big, fat, wet flakes.  It was warm, which was good but also bad because neither my puffy jacket nor my ski pants are particularly waterproof.  By the time we got to the top of Collins, there was around an inch of new snow coating the frozen hardpack underneath.  I went straight to Supreme, got a chair to myself and it kept snowing harder.  As I neared the top of that lift, it was snowing so hard that you couldn't see the next lift tower.  Now I was anxious about driving home: if only I'd skied earlier in the week, or if only I'd taken the bus.  I decided to do two runs at each lift and then check the parking lot back at Wildcat base to see if the snow was sticking to the road.

Extra large photo so you can see the falling snowflakes

As it turns out, the roads were fine, warm enough that snow didn't stick at all.  And after about forty minutes of snowing hard, it stopped - and the weather just kept changing every ten or fifteen minutes, like it didn't know what to do.  Snow, then no precipitation and flat light, then the sun would come out enough that I was overdressed, then a little graupel squall, then back to dry with flat light, and so on.  The snow was variable as well: the top of Collins was bulletproof, then the middle bit was pretty nice, then coming down through Corkscrew you were skiing on frozen death cookies.

I left a little after 1 p.m., having done plenty of runs as there were so few people that I never had to wait in line.  When there were enough people to merit my going to the singles line, I skied right to the front of the line and filled a chair; otherwise I was able to ski right onto the chairs.  I felt like I was skiing better than last time too: I went at exactly the pace I wanted to and I wasn't anxious about other skiers.  The conditions might not have been what I had hoped for but it was still a really good day.