For 9 years now I’ve been taking a bro-cation somewhere cold & snowy, mostly to Western North America but once to Tremblant QC. After a pretty good trip to Park City last winter, and tasting the Cottonwoods for the first time, we elected to return to Utah but stay away from Park City area. We rented a condo just outside the canyons and had five days on the mountains.
All-in-all, it was a superb trip; we got the entire smorgasbord of spring conditions from pow to blizzards to slush to corduroy. Honestly, it is going to be difficult to top this trip next winter. Here is a brief recap.
Sunday @ Brighton – We arrived Saturday night, late, and it was snowing heavy at the airport. By morning 12+ inches of fresh pow had fallen on Brighton. We hooked up with Burritos and Snow again, and spent most of the day on Milly hitting natural features & small drops, riding pow, a little time on Snake Creek express lift until they re-opened Great Western about 1pm so we headed over there for an hour to catch more fresh tracks on that side. Wrapped it up about 2pm.
There was an unfortunate collision at the Field Goal jump on Milly side, which Burritos happened to capture on his GoPro. If you haven’t seen it yet, go check out the “Blocked Field Goal” on Burritos’ youtube channel.
Monday @ Snowbird - 4-6 inches of fresh on top of the 12-16″ they had received the day before, spent a lot of time on Mineral Basin/Baldy (backside) but dicked around on the front side too. Snowbird is a lot of mountain, mostly steeps, and with a few greenhorns on this trip one day there was all we needed. Fortunately we had beautiful weather, leftover pow stashes, warm & bluebird all day long. At the end of the day Brad & Zach decided to download on the Tram. I tried to race them down on my board taking Chip’s Run to Rothman way to Primrose. They just barely beat me, I think I would’ve had them if I’d taken a more direct route via Silver Fox.
Dave & Garrett, Mineral Basin peak, Snowbird UT
Tuesday @ Powder Mountain – The weather was going to be bogus anywhere, the cottonwoods would’ve been iced over & frozen but it was much warmer in Ogden so we gambled on PowMow. Unfortunately it was too warm and the snow was thick and slow like mashed potatoes; decent slush at the summit but progressively stickier on the way down to the lifts. We only rode 1/2 day there, but I’d like to go back, it looks like it would be an awesome mountain to ride in better conditions.
Wednesday @ Brighton – a few inches (maybe 4) of dust on the previous day’s crust, spent a lot of time crusing corduroy groomers from the Snake Creek and Crest Express lifts. I also got an opportunity to hike Pioneer Peak with Burritos; the hike was exhausting, the ride down was pretty awesome to be able to say I did my first legit backcountry run but we only did it once. For starters, I think hiking a second time might’ve killed me. I’m in good riding shape, but not in very good climbing shape. Also, the conditions were sketchy variable – one turn might be nice powder, the next was dust on crust. We closed the day hiking the kiddie-sized terrain park just for grins; by this time nobody had the legs left to try anything bigger.
Pioneer summit, Brighton sidecountry
Thursday @ Brighton – a trace of snow overnight, but about as soon as we got there 930am it started dumping pretty hard, whiteout conditions up top and a little windy but the snow never stopped coming down. We were making fresh tracks every time we got off the lift because it was coming down that hard & heavy. It sucked having to pack up the car & leave at 2pm for our flight home! By this time everyone was feeling great and nobody wanted to stop riding, but we had a flight to catch unfortunately. We had a few pops and left a present of Heineken on top of some Subie in the parking lot, a couple dudes had just arrived as we were leaving, so we thought it would be cool to leave them a few brews for the apres.
Here is a clip that Brad captured from the top of Snake Creek chair:
Summing it up: I think everyone experienced more than one “Best run of my life!” on this trip. Yeah,the variety of conditions and the fact that we rode as much as we did compared to last year when we rode mostly PM half-days because the snow wasn’t worth waking up early for, it’s gonna be very tough to top this trip without a week of consistent fresh powpow.
