- and welcomed by a 38" storm total, http://www.alta.com/pages/report.php I am getting worn out. I cut today short after 4 runs so I could save my legs for a guided backcountry day at Powder Mountain tomorrow. It was a bit heavy but still one of the top 5 days of my life. It should settle a bit overnight and be even better tomorrow. I got a late start after yesterday's harrowing drive back from Mammoth in snow. Missed him at the mountain but had dinner with John L in SLC.

Hi Denis I heard from my Utah crew last night, unfortunatly I decided to go to Colorada in April and skipped this trip. I'm not sure if it was the beer, I think it was the powder they've had three pretty deep days in a row and they're skiing til Friday. They skied Snowbasin ysty beacuse they couldn't get up the Cottonwoods. Have fun at PowMow.

Yeah, that was a whopper of a storm, enough to eventually close the canyon overnight. As usual, I have great skiing while I am at Alta, and then it ratchets up by at least a factor of 2 when I depart.... So you can thank me for leaving!

Thanks Craig!

Alta was surprisingly sweet on Wednesday; got in 3.5 hours before flying out. I thought it would have been skied out a lot more after the powder feeding frenzy on Tuesday. 3 or so inches overnight helped freshen things up. With good choice of line (hug avi boundary ropes) and some lucky hunting, found fairly deep pow on the Sugarloaf and Supreme lifts. Also hit two great untracked trips with the brief hike up Keyhole Gulch. Was surprisingly in The White Room (briefly) near Three Bears. Didn't see that one coming.

Ran across the Jimmy Crew (sans Jimmy) in the lift line at Supreme. We toasted Jimmy. (Sorta.) Jimmy, not sure what happened to Bruce (showed him a good pow line), but I looked behind me and all I saw was his ski sticking up in the air. After five minutes of waiting for him to put his skis on (with futile assistance from Paul), I had to leave for the airport.

Denis: Vail ridge had plenty of untracked during my lift ride up in the AM. Plenty of good stuff still around just off the trails.

Ballroom, Devils Castle, Cecret Saddle were closed. Could be some freshies tomorrow for those still in Utah.

Ah, great report, glad you got some good skiing in there. Three Bears reminds me of a mini WV tree skiing area, and always contains a lot of hidden snow. I am sure there are lines I haven't found yet, despite skiing everything from the chute at the bottom to the trees at the top. And most of it is not on the map at all. They really should call it 30 Bears.

Vail Ridge can also be a lot of fun. I hit the Sunnyside chair for the free skiing after 3pm on the day I flew in, right after a big powder dump. For free, Vail Ridge turned out to be spectacularly good. I didn't even have time to hit it all. There are some long low-angle powder runs off the backside of Vail Ridge that I hit last year with a fellow GMD lodger, and we were amazed at the length and quality of uninterrupted first tracks, days after a storm.

While I was there last week, Cecret Saddle was closed almost the whole time. Which is too bad, as I like venturing in there for some medium-scary terrain with low commitment and not much work. And down below, it can get interesting as you skirt around the frozen Cecret Lake on the way to Supreme. When Cecret does open, it should have a good 10+ days of uninterrupted snow. I took the trouble to get into Devil's Castle last week, but the snow was so wind packed it just wasn't worth it.

I haven't skied Keyhole Gulch in a while mainly because I am too lazy to hike up the knob to the top, but there's a great line down into that same toilet bowl area from up by the Collins lift top station. If you traverse a short way around the backside, and then start dropping down, there are several rock groupings you can shoot through on the way down. It's borderline scary, but fun. I think it's #53 and #54 on the map, roughly.

Cripes, that reminds me, I didn't hit the backside at all last week. So much terrain, so little time....

Glad you skied those Albion Basin places Craig. They are among my secret stashes for days when the stuff with the big reputation on the Collins side is skied out. I am happy to share them with DCSkiers, but not on any forum that is read by the hordes of locusts in SLC. (I love JohnL's term.) On 3/8 I rode a chair with a couple who had settled on Albion for the day after finding backside and even Greeley Hill tracked out. The latter is reached only by about a mile of traversing all the way to the end of the Hi-T and around the corner. I've never been there.