Powder Mountain, UT 1/8 - 1/11/11

I had plans of skiing Magic tomorrow. Sounds like this snow is better than anything we had in Utah.

Ted,
It's your chance to go to Alta...or how about Solitude?
I hope my flight gets out tomorrow

We're in ATL, Our flight out of SLC was at 12:50 last night. Hopefully good news on our flight is coming soon. IF we get on the flight we're waitlisted for, I would be very Happy.

Running on about 2 hours of sleep.

Yesterday (1-11-11) TR

We spent quite a bit of time in the morning figuring out what we were gonna do. Since we had to be out of the Condo by 11:00 AM, we decided we would stop by the club house to shower and sort our bags. Turns out the club house didn't have showers, so we skipped out on that plan. Our only real time constraint was getting the demo skis back to the shop down in SLC. Without traffic, it's about 1:20. With traffic, it was closer to 1:45.


We decided to park at the peak of Hidden Lake so we wouldn't have to spend an extra half hour on chairlifts just to get our lunch. Turns out we never really ate lunch, but it worked out well anyways. Our first run was down a short groomer then in some trees just skiers left of the Hidden Lake lift. There was probably 10" new in there, most of it was blown in by the wind. Temps were around 3 degrees, with a wind chill that was easily -10.


 We came back up the lift and saw Powder Country was open. We took it down to the road and got a whole lot of crust. I wasn't too surprised because it was all baking in the sun. With good snow, I'm sure everything in there would be sick.



 

At the bottom we caught the shuttle and had it take us to Sundown. From there we rode the lift and got the cat at lightning ridge. No guide this time, and it was all to ourselves. We traversed over and I was first to drop in. There was a fairly large wind cornice there, probably to my knees when I skied through it. I realized it was starting to slide and got REALLY nervous. I had no avy gear and very little avy knowledge. Luckily it was only a few feet. You can see it in the POV edit (That doesn't exist yet ).

We skied down, caught the traverse over, but Mike and his dad thought we didn't get it high enough because it didn't look familiar. I was fairly sure it was right, so I started across it again. I stopped and looked back, Mike and his dad were already dropping into that bowl. It had a moderate pitch, was untracked, and had lots o snow. I was content with it and dropped in, only a little further down the line.








We rode the cat track back down to the lift, and took the two lifts back over to Powder Country from the Hidden Lake side. When we were on the bus from the run before, I was looking at which sides may hold decent snow. I was right! We came back over and followed the ridge in. I wish we had followed it just a little farther to get a few more turns out of the pitch. Oh well, hindsight is 20/20




At the bottom of the run, we saw John, our guide from the day before. He was coming down Powder Country from the Sundown side of the valley. We talked a bit and he told us to follow him for some real good snow. We followed him up and he was right. It was exposed to the sun, so there was some crust underneath. Regardless, it skied great. The first pitch we hardly hit the crusty layer at all, the second one wasn't as great.






We lapped that with him two more times, and it started to get some more tracks on it. He wanted to Head back up to Lightning Ridge and try the South face, and we were going to go with him. We had to run in and get tickets for the cat and some fuel (we still hadn't eaten lunch yet). He took the lift up while we went in, and we saw the cat driving away right as we were getting off the lift. We missed that run with him by about 2 minutes. Damn. I wasn't really interested in skiing the South face anyways, but I was trying to get a tip to him before he disappeared (Always tip your ski instructor!). Dazilla, if you decide you want a guide at PM, request John. He's a great skier who definitely knows the mountain, and is a good guy in general.

We had to sit around for a while for the cat to make the full trip, but we caught it and headed out to the same run we did before. The lady at the ticket window said they were getting a lot of business, so we were pretty nervous it would be tracked out. We went back to the same bowl we did before just below hair raiser, and our tracks were still the only ones in there. We rode that again, took the lifts up, and called it a day.



I think the most upsetting part about the run is parking at the top of the mountain. Rather than skiing out to your car and saying "Damn, that was an epic run!" it became "Damn, that was a cold chairlift ride!"

We left the mountain at 4, got into the city to return the skis around 5:45, and have either been in an airport or on a plane ever since. Apparently we're pretty high on the waiting list, fingers are crossed for an epic day back East tomorrow rather than an epic day waiting around in the airport, again.

Good luck getting back Fuje.  We got about 10 inches here in NNJ.  I would have headed to Mountain Creek for a powder day if I wasn't flying out tomorrow night.

Thanks Fuje for the great trip reports and to everyone else for the inside information.  I am hoping we get up to powder or snowbasin at least once on our trip.  I will look up John if we go to pow mow.  I have hear from several people that you should get a guide there to get a feel for the place. I am going to try to get 5 days in out there if my legs and liver can handle it.  I will try to post up some TRs while I am out there.  We are staying downtown with a car so we will head where the best snow is reported.

Fuje how did you get those sweet google maps?  Were you tracking your position with a phone/gps or did you pull those off the web somewhere?

Hope all yinz in the North Country enjoy the new snow.

Mike and I caught the last two seats from the waiting list. We got in Albany around 6. His dad had to get the flight after us, which should be leaving ATL in about 15 minutes.

The lines were just off of Google Earth. You can play with the eye elevation and there is an option to draw paths, shapes, ect. I just took a print screen of them

POV edit is coming along well. A bit more work to do.

I would tell you if you just went by the maps I posted, you would be fine. However, they're supposed to get some snow Thursday/Friday I think. I'm sure when the snow is better, you don't really need to look as hard for the good stuff.

I would definitely recommend cat skiing. $15 / run, and it's cat skiing!

Does this mean that Magic is on for tommorrow?  



Oh yea and let me get this straight... you did the above TR from the ATL airport?

Bonus points for that!

Looks like fantastic skiing to me.

Magic, Plattekill, Mad River, or Gore.

The TGR forums are down, so I have no BETA to know where to go!

Yes, the TR was from the airport. I even had to pay for WiFi there! Blasphemy!
I was there from 5:45 in the morning till about 3:30 this afternoon. Turns out some people had been there for three days! Sucks for them.

I finally got the POV edit done/rendered/uploaded.

Enjoy.

Nice TR Fujative. I discovered PM last year thanks to PDQ and really like it. It's the kind of place that takes a bit to fiqure out but if you poke around you can find good snow days after the last dump. Cobabe is worth it but you have to go out farther than you think to get the vert. With all the different caynons there you can always find a pitch that didn't get hammered by the sun. And where else can you cat ski for 15 bucks a run!