This morning, we woke up and found that it had snowed in the valley overnight and everything had at least an inch of snow on it. However, it was a totally sunny morning and the roads cleared really fast, so we packed up and drove up the mountain to the Canyons Resort in Park City.
What an amazing place....you walk from your car to the edge of the parking lot and step on a cabriolet (something I had never seen before). It's a little open-air compartment that you stand in and it carries you up the mountain over the resort buildings and roads, up to the base of the ski mountain. Then, you exit the cabriolet, walk over the loading area and get in a gondola to ride to the top of the mountain. The gondolas seat 6 people (completely enclosed) and your equipment rides in racks on the outside. That was also a first!
All of that was new and fun, but the skiing was absolutely awesome! The snow was perfect (not frozen and not slushy), the temperature was around 40 (not too cold or too warm), there were more runs than you could possibly hope to cover in a day, and the lifts serviced 5 different peaks. We skiied some groomed runs, some bump runs (I'm improving on these-- yea!), and one really deep powder run. I fell twice in the deep powder and got really frustrated with that, for sure. Powder skiing is a skill that is fairly non-existent in my skiing abilities, but I would love to learn how to do it. It looks like so much fun when watching the people that know how to ski in powder go down the mountain.
At a new resort, we always try to take every lift at least once (if it has at least one groomed run!). We really wanted to make it to the Iron Mountain lift, but it closed at 3:30 and was at the far side of the resort by itself. We made it on the lift and checked the time after we loaded and it said 3:29. That was great, except that the lift to get out of that area closed at 4:00, so we only had 30 minutes to get back down the mountain. That normally wouldn't worry us too much, except that when we got off at the top, the first 2 runs down that we passed had signs that said "closed," so we kept going and got to the last available run which had warning signs that said "thin cover." No choice--we had to take it. Not only was it thin snow, but it was the longest bump run that we found the entire day AND there was not another person in sight. (By the way--we now know that "thin cover" means that rocks and small bush stems are sticking out of the snow.) In addition to the big bumps and obstacles, there were a couple of places where we had to just traverse over flat sections following the one set of tracks that somebody left earlier. We made it, but it was a little un-nerving to be that alone at the end of the day.
Even though that run was completely intimidating, this was, by far, the best day of skiing in my life! We skiied until the lifts were closed for the day and I wasn't ready for it to end.....well, my legs were ready, but I wanted to keep playing.
Tomorrow, we are headed to the Park City Resort (home of some of the 2002 Olympics ski events) and I hope that it will be another fantastic day on the snow!
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