For the Youtube video of the trip click here:
Park City Powder Days
For the first time in a long time (five years I think) I got to explore a brand new ski area! I had told Kim, my lovely lady, that I wanted to ski Park City, Crested Butte, or Jackson Hole this winter and she managed to get a couple of days off of work and we made it happen. Saturday morning we attempted to find some last minute lodging deals for cheap and every hotel we could find was sold out or about $1000 per night! After a little more research we discovered that the Sundance film
festival was in Park City that week. I was excited because I figured a bunch of movie nerds weren't going to be skiing and we would have the hill to ourselves. So after work on Saturday we loaded up the station wagon with a mattress pad, our sleeping bags, and all our ski gear and figured that we would just sleep in the car in a parking lot somewhere! As we were driving towards the town of Meeker, my excitement worked it's way down to my right foot a little and I got pulled over for speeding. Due to a technical misunderstanding, I was without my proof of insurance, which needed to be downloaded to my phone. Of course we were in an area without any data service so I received a summons to appear at the Rio Blanco county court. Bah! Our moods were still high, however, and the officer was wondering why we were laughing as he delivered the summons to me. As soon as we got to Rangely we took our phones out of airplane mode to see if we could get data and I could download my proof of insurance, just in case. We did get service and Kim's phone started blowing up with texts. Unbeknownest to me, Kim had gone on couchsurfers.com and tried to find us a couch to crash on. She had struck out all day, but while we were driving a blessed soul named Roger decided that, even though he could make a bunch of money renting his couch to a Sundancer, he would much rather rent it to a couple dirt bag skiers for free!!! SCORE! I love Kim for so many reasons, but the fact that she's a member of couchsurfers.com ranks right up there on the list! Sleeping quarters confirmed, we
continued our journey. After a few hours of driving without coming across another soul we entered in to a small town in Utah. I think it may have been Vernal, but I'm not totally sure. I slow down to match the 45 mph speed limit and am cruising along obeying all the traffic laws, or so I thought. The first car we happen to pass on the road happens to be a police officer and happens to slow down and flips a u-turn right behind me. What in the world?! I check my speed, perfect, my headlights...crap, my brights are on! The officer kindly informs me that it is illegal to drive in the state of Utah without a rear bumper, which I am missing, and questions whether or not we have anything illegal in our car. You know, that isn't illegal in Colorado, wink, wink! I think this is the fifth time I've gotten pulled over because I have Colorado license plates. Leave us alone coppers! We aren't all pot heads! Anyway, he also thought we were stupid for wanting to ski at Park City during Sundance.
"There are going to be 50,000 people there!" he exclaimed.
"Well, hopefully not on the slopes," I replied.
"There's also a big blizzard up ahead."
"Sweet!!"
Quizzical stare...."Alright then, you be safe."
I realized that he was warning me about the blizzard because of driving safety. Little does he know that I will drive in any conditions, even at 5mph, to get to a powder day. Kim and I eventually hit the blizzard and it was a true whiteout. As we were driving back a few days later I kept trying to find landmarks and places I had picked out during the storm and absolutely nothing looked even remotely familiar. There were certainly times that I was plugging along at 5 mph, but we rolled into Park City
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safely, just about two hours after we expected to! We plunked our stuff down at about 0230 in Roger's living room and hit the hay. I don't know what time it was, but I was later woken up by Roger's roommate rummaging around in the kitchen. He was very high and very fired up! Apparently Steve makes a lot of money during Sundance and he wanted to make sure that Kim and I knew just exactly how amazing that was. In my sleep deprived state I was thinking that Steve was getting up and heading off to work and so I started waking my own body up because I was so excited to explore a new mountain. This was a mistake. After laying there waiting for my alarm to go off for a seeming eternity, I finally checked my clock to discover it was only about 0430! Bah again! I fought to try and get a few more winks before my alarm to little avail. Still, when my alarm finally did go off, my adrenaline was pumping and I was ready to go! We woke up to the blizzard still storming and headed in to town. While Kim got a coffee, I headed to a shop to try and get a trail map. They didn't have a paper version, but I got some good beta from the guy at the desk and a large wall mount map. We started at the Town lift and made our way as directly as possible to Jupiter bowl. Our first lap we made the mistake of dropping in too early and winding up on a very rocky face that was not very nice to the bases of our skis. Our next time down was much better, and then it got better, and better, and better! The more we got to know the mountain the better the runs were that we found. My favorite was on
the East Face. After lapping different chutes down the face about five times I noticed people starting to ask Kim and me for beta. I just steered them all away from what had become my favorite chute down and kept lapping! We wandered around though the trees for a couple runs after that, and then headed down to the single black areas of the mountain for a couple runs, but ultimately headed back to Jupiter bowl for our last run of the day. It had been storming and blowing very hard all day so when we got back to the West face of Jupiter Peak we discovered that every single track made that morning had been covered up and we got first tracks again! It was a great day and an even greater way to end it.
For day two we decided to go explore the Canyons side of the mountain and started the day on the Orange bubble heading to Murdock Peak. Murdock's had some hike-to terrain that we were excited about but found closed our first time up the lift. We made our way down a South facing crust fest and went back up to find all the hike-to terrain just opening up and only one person in front of us on the boot pack! The snow was very light and untouched and glorious and only about a five minute hike away! After two laps on Murdock's we headed South to explore other areas. After trying the terrain off a couple lifts we found our favorite area of the trip. The Ninety-Nine 90 lift! The hike-to terrain off the top of this lift is pretty much all we did from that point on. The snow was so lovely both to skier's left and right off this lift I immediately texted my friends back home to let them know they were going to be really jealous of us as soon as they saw the footage from my GoPro! After our first lap down the skier's right face I spied a cliff line that looked very nice. The second lap down I dropped about a 30 footer into a perfect landing that the GoPro battery managed to cut off almost perfectly. Kim reminded me recently that I needed to add that after skiing this face as we were in the run out trees heading back to the bottom, I committed a blunder. While skiing behind Kim I went a little to the left and skied through some tight trees. I could see Kim coming over from the right, but I thought she was going to turn downhill before she crossed in front of me. I was wrong! My choices were either running in to a tree, or running into Kim. I chose running in to Kim! I slammed into her and picked her up as we flew down the mountain. After a couple seconds I knew that if I fell forward on top of Kim I would definitely hurt her so I pulled both of us backwards so that she would land on top of me! A little panicked, I asked Kim if she was OK. "I'm fine!" she says! Luckily I am marrying a really tough chica! The next day heading up the 99-90 I was looking at the skier's right face and noticed that about three small slides had occurred overnight, one of which was triggered by my landing crater! A little sketched out by the slides we decided to head to the skier's left face which was a little less inclined and less likely to slide. This was Kim's favorite line and the snow was incredible. We went to the skier's right side next, but we went way further right that we had gone before and found some very stable snow and very awesome turns! We left to explore some new areas and ended up on the new Quicksilver gondola. We got off at the mid-station and hiked the Pinecone ridge and found some very fun terrain, but nothing compared to the 99-90. So we headed back for one more run and I just couldn't resist one last run down the middle of the skier's right face! After making about three turns down the face I triggered yet another small slide that I raced all the way to the bottom! A couple more runs and we called it an early day since we needed to drive home that night.
A couple general thoughts. The town of Park City is cool. The ski area has a lot of steep runs, but they are all very short. It reminds me a little of Breckenridge in that way, but I don't remember ever having as much fun at Breckenridge. Hiking even five minutes from the top of the chair lift is waaay more hiking than 99% of skiers seem to want to do. We had miles of fresh tracks two days after the last storm just a five minute hike from the lift! The Revenant with DiCaprio was depressing for me, but Kim liked it.
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