41st Day in Alta

My buddy Ken, skinning up the hill. Ken is a fellow East Cost expatriate with a skiing and cycling “problem”.

A "long" draught (about 2 weeks without new snow) and a very warm spring weather came to an end on Monday. The winter has returned into the Wasatch – the forth day of snow fall in the valley resulted in almost a foot of pretty fluffy powder up in the Little Cottonwood Canyon. It took me 40 days to figure out how to curve a tele-turn in the deep snow. All that theoretical stuff about the “one big platform”, “equal weight on each ski” and “not edging” finally came together and I was able to link a few fairly nice tele-turns in the waste-deep, sugary desert snow. This is the very quantum leap that I was looking for in the last several weeks. I sort of hit the plato in my skiing and didn’t feel any improvements until yesterday – when it all clicked…

The mountain men

On the picture is my friend and Backcountry mentor Lloyd Johnson, taking climbing skins off his skis before “ripping it down”. Lloyd has planned and led every single one of my Backcountry "ventures". He is a very humble and unassuming man, yet an incredible athlete. Lloyd guided all of our "back side" outings, cut all skin tracks and climbed up so fast that I could barely keep up with him. He is also an avid runner with 11 marathon finishes and 2nd place in his age group in Chicago Marathon.

Last week after a 3 days long class taught by “Utah Mountain Adventures” ski guides, I got a “Level I Avalanche Forecasting/Rescue” certificate. Now I can consider myself “legit” in the Backcountry. By no means do I think of myself as an expert, but at least I can be self-sufficient in the avalanche terrain and can stop being a liability to my ski-friends. I learned how to use beacon, probe, shovel, travel safely in the Backcountry, test stability of the snow and perform a basic rescue. I do realize that having this knowledge is not an insurance from being caught in the avalanche, just like having a driver license and obeying road signs doesn’t exclude a possibility of the fatal car accident, but at least I stopped feeling like a kid who is sneaking into the theater to see R-rated movie. The additional benefit of the class was a chance to ski with professional ski-mountaineers: Dave Budge (Dave climbed with Alex Lowe and skied Mt. Denali) and Mark Appling who has been a skiing/climbing guide in the Wasatch for the last 20 years. On Saturday afternoon Dave took us to the White Pine Trailhead in the Little Cottonwood Canyon. We skinned up a picturesque mountain a few miles west of Snowbird and after digging pits, testing snow and doing rescue drills we got to ski a juicy chute, whose name completely escapes me. On Sunday, Mark set an aggressive skin track up the Grizzly Gulch and we ripped a few lines in the Silver Fork – another Wasatch Backcountry notable. Both Dave and Mark are true “Mountain Men”, who turn their passion into a career which pays very little or has a huge pay out, depending on how you look at it…

Saturday in the Cirque

This morning I got up at 6:30AM, gulped down my Oatmeal with coffee and headed out to the Little Cottonwood to rip a few Tele-turns. The day progressed as follows:

- Up the Supreme Lift and short hike up to the Sunset pick (hike on skis)
- Ski Sunset Pick and climb back up (ski and skins)
- Ski Wolverine bowl twice (once on each side of the Cirque)
- Climb back up for each descend (ski and skins)
- Lunch
- Climb Rocky Point (hike on skis)
- Ski down
- Climb back up (ski and skins)

And the crowning jewel of the day – booting up the Wolverine and putting the first track on Granny’s Couloir in the Cirque! That’s right, we put the first track on the Wolverine Cirque’s Chute! Yes, it’s the least technical of Cirque's Couloirs, but it was my first and it hasn’t been skied since the last snowstorm. The first picture is the Cirque and the second has Granny's Chute marked with a red line.

Altaholics Anonymous

“…Alta remains a shrine, where you come to worship mountains and snow and do a little skiing.” - Denis Bogan

I have to report 3 new inches of snow in Alta – it was on the wet side and a bit heavy, but it’s still a powder. This morning I was riding a chairlift with three East Coast tourists who were discussing state-of-the-art amenities of their Park City 4 bedroom, 4 bathroom Condo. There are two types of skiers in Alta: those who ski Alta and those who visit Alta. My three “liftmates” were not Alta skiers, they were visitors. I have to explain why they were not Alta skiers. If your idea of ski vacation is a hot chocolate or cocktail between each run, heated tram ride up, kobe beef burger for lunch and massage at the end of the day, Alta is not for you. You need to be in Park City (were my three "friends" were actually staying). Alta is a different type of place. First of all it’s one of the only two resorts in the country that doesn’t allow Snowboarders to ride the lift (Vermont’s Mad River Glenn is the second) – Alta is for skiers only. It’s best and likely only amenities are “luxurious” mountains and “gourmet” snow. There are several lodges in Alta, but you will not find flat-screen TV’s, moose or bear heads mounted on the walls or a five-star dining. The “Alta Lodge” is the old wooden hut, where you can change from civilian shoes into ski boots, strap on backpack, shovel, probe and ride the lift for a few “warm up” runs, before going “on the back side” for the rest of the day. If you forgot your thermos with coffee or a peanut-butter sandwich, a twenty-something bearded dude with dreadlocks will pour you some “Joe” and throw a frozen beef-patty on the grill. But he is not there to serve food. He is there to ski. The only reason he is making your lunch is the fact that he is given a free Season Pass for his services. And as for his “training”, no, the dude is not holding a Cooking Arts degree from the CIA. Most likely he attended some no-name college in New Hampshire on ski scholarship, didn’t make USA X-Games team, dropped out and is a professional ski bum now. Just like Mad River Glen, Alta has a huge population of Telemark skiers. Since I am one of them and I come to Alta only for skiing, you can see why I love the place.

Rats in stomachs and brains

After almost two weeks of dreadful weather (warm and wet) eleven inches of fresh snow covered Alta this morning. However I only skied half a day. The reason was that after eating dinner three days ago I began to feel as if I swallowed a dead rat. I ended up spending a night in the bathroom hugging a toilet bowl and making out with it. I must assure you that I was very passionate and did not hold back. Finally I was asleep by 4AM. I spent the next day curled up in the fetal position on the couch in semi-comatose nirvana, getting by on tea, chicken broth and record Dow losses. Yesterday I felt like I was back to normal, but since I haven’t been eaten for almost two days I stayed home. Apparently I didn’t miss much – in addition to the terrible snow conditions, 80MPH wind at 11, 000 fit caused one of the chairlifts to shutdown and all 89 people on it had to be evacuated by the Ski Patrol. This morning I left a couple of “first tracks” on the north side of the Supreme Lift, but the cheese sandwich (my lunch) made me keenly aware of my recent ailment. I had to cut the day short and go home to get back on the chicken broth and Ginseng Tea diet. I am hoping to be fully recovered for the snow storm that is expected Sunday morning. As for the Dow, I think I am going to agree with one of the analysis that I recently read: the “irrational exuberance” of the 90th, right now has been replaced by the “irrational pessimism”. The Detroit’s autoworkers and Mortgage Derivatives Traders will not see their industries recover any time soon, but folks who still have their jobs, survived layoffs (if any) and whose industries haven’t been affected by the recession all that much, in my opinion, should snap out of the “doom-and-gloom” mood. And the picture for today’s post depicts the content of my stomach on Monday (as I imagined it) and the state of mind of the proponents of “economic Armageddon” (also as I imagine it).