This is part 3 in a series documenting our week in Park City. You can catch up on Part 1, and Part 2.
After driving in to SLC to pick up A-Train, the newest member of our touring party at the airport, we made the short trek back through the mountains to Brighton Resort, where we met @BurritosAndSnow, a Utah rider that I’d met through snowboardingforum.com. He graciously gave us the tour of Brighton and we rode with him until he left around 330pm.
A few runs in to the day, however, A-train went AWOL. We would later see him walking down the hill carrying his ski, and upon examination, it appeared that hisbinding had snapped clean off at the screws. Fortunately, after we took it in to the shop, they found that whoever initially mounted the bindings used screws that were too short to really thread in to the ski. That could’ve been very, very bad.
Weather at Brighton was sunny, close to 30 degrees and snowing when we got there. A storm settled in around 3pm which would drop 3-5″ over the course of the afternoon/evening, making visibility poor but riding conditions excellent. We all hit a bit of everything at Brighton, from groomers to glades to a few end-of-day slackcountry runs of Milly’s Chair. Only regret is that we didn’t find Milly’s Chair earlier in the day, because the open glades down there were rad.
Brighton is a modest-sized resort, convenient because most of the runs funnel back to a common base area so it’s great for groups of people of varying skill-level. The crowds were minimal, but the resort itself was spartan compared to the big boys like PCMR and The Canyons. I would definitely make a return visit, and in-fact we had planned on doing so to get more something-something from Milly Chair until we saw the forecast for Snowbird which also was heavily recommended.
Thursday evening we had dinner at the Wasatch Brew Pub (burgers all around and one order of the trout) — everything was great, including the delicious double IPA that wrecked us. We met some local cowboy snowboarder girl who flashed a knife at Doug and called B-rad a “goddamn ratard” but was cool enough to play quarters with us at the bar. Being the only people in an empty bar playing quarter-bounce is a recipe for disaster, and Doug eventually found a way to get kicked out.
Friday we wished Chris and Doug farewell as we headed back to PCMR for another day.
