East meets West

Well the weather has been nothing less than interesting for the past two weeks. Almost 50" of new snow in two days down in the Cottonwood Canyons was followed by a few more inches of snow. Then the weather took a break for a few days while the temperature rose and the next storm system moved in. However, this time the freezing level hit the ceiling, rising all the way up to 9500 feet and raining on all of that delicious coldsmoke powder and turning the whole thing into an Ontario-esque ice skating rink. At least mountain weather is never boring (unless you live in Southern California).

I took a drive by Snowbasin, on the back side of Mt. Ogden, the other day and noticed that the upper bowls had good snow coverage. Also, thanks to their snowmaking, it was possible to start skinning from basically the parking lot at 6500 feet.



Well, I knew that it was going to be crusty and icy up there, but I convinced my room mate to come have a look with me. I figured if nothing else it would be good training. The past few days have had the temperature way above normal and the freezing levels have been crazy high, above 10,500 feet. I figured we'd encounter stout crusts in the morning which would soften into something soft or mushy as the day progressed. Boy was I wrong. That snow was hard as hell all day! Here's where we started skinning.



Yours truly lovin' the arm shot.



Joshua skinning on up on the only soft snow we found the whole day. Too bad it was only 3 inches deep here.



Here's Chris skinning up with the tail end of the Bear River Range in the background.



Initially the plan was to skin up to a saddle next to the summit of Mt. Ogden and ski the southeast facing bowl that drops down. However, the higher we got the more iced over everything was. In fact the snow was shimmering and glazed over. Not a good sight to see when you're about to ski. But the views were awesome!





So we changed our plans and headed towards the Needles Lodge, a sheik lodge/restaurant located at about 8700 feet. The last couple hundred feet to the lodge involved some of the diciest, scariest skinning I've ever done. It was basically pure ice. So we took a long lunch and waited around for a while to let the snow/ice soften up. Well, eventually it did, but only the top 2 millimeters. Sweet. We probably would've had to wait another two hours for that snow to really soften up. Crazy.

Here's a view from the Lodge.



The boys ready to slay or be slain by some Icy Death.



Our tracks in the "soft" snow section.



Chris in deep. Not.



Despite the icy conditions, it was a great day. We were able to skin and ski right back to the car for 2200 vertical feet of descent. Not bad considering the snowline was really 1000 feet above where we started. It was a beautiful day to be in the mountains with fantastic views and great weather. Now if we could just have another 40 + inches sans rain please?