Even though it's tough to find fault with any of the Salt Lake City-region ski areas, Snowbasin has always been my favorite. With chutes, cirques, and steep bowls at the very top for strong skiers and gullies, meadows, and skiable trees everywhere else, it feels like the best of the Little Cottonwood Canyons and the Park City ski areas.
Given that my trips to SLC are usually in mid-December, when Snowbasin rarely has much terrain open, I hadn't skied there in seven years. While driving up, I thought about my previous visit, a memorable
March 2009 powder day, and realized that I wasn't going to hit paydirt like that. Whereas the Cottonwood Canyons were basking in blazing sunshine, Snowbasin was blanketed by dense clouds. Moreover, when I arrived at 9 am, the main parking lots were almost completely full and the base area felt like an ant colony:
Snow conditions were really nice, but the first half of the day was challenging due to the top third of the mountain being completely socked in with fog and steady snow. Visibility was as bad as some storm days I've skied in the Alps and not conducive to great photos:
Still, I skied nonstop, starting with Grizzly and Wildflower (the men's and women's Olympic downhill runs) on the far skier's left off the John Paul lift. Given how many cars were in the parking lot, it was amazing how few people I ran into on the hill:
Finally, around 1 pm, it started to clear up, so I made a beeline to the Strawberry terrain zone, which had been a borderline whiteout the entire day:
My legs were too shot to go on any long traverses or hike for completely untracked powder, so I lapped all those beautiful gullies for the next 2.5 hours:
Locked
