Cutler Ridge

Happy New Year everyone! It's been a bit since I've blogged. I was out of town for the holidays and have since started my new job and it's been pretty busy lately, but I'm loving it. I'm on skis everyday and get to watch the sunrise and set on the beautiful Wasatch. It's definitely a great way to start and end the day. We got a decent bit of snow on Friday night. Storm totals were 8-9 inches, so after being a good boy and running errands that needed to get done on Saturday (I did manange to sneak a few turns in at the end of the day), it was time to head out to the mountains on foot this lovely Sunday morning.

While lift skiing can certainly be fun on a powder day, it does leave me a bit unsatisfied at times since I've become a powder snob after living in Canada. Needless to say, it felt great to throw the skins on the skis, breathe the crisp mountain air (it was -12F/-24C at the parking lot today), step into my Dynafits and skin uphill. Today we met at 7am to ski some lines off of Cutler Ridge, a broad ridge that descends off the northeast side of Ben Lomond, the monarch of the Northern Wasatch. Chris (my roommate) and I met up with my friend Doug and a couple of his buddies, Aaron, Chad, and Dave (?). Sorry bad with names. As we skinned up...



We watched the sun come up.



The brisk morning air refroze to my face as I exhaled. Even though it was cold, I was so glad to be hiking for turns.



Doug had to leave a little earlier than us so he headed back down around 8200'. The rest of skinned up a couple hundred more vertical feet. Cutler Ridge faces northeast, but there are shots to the south and north that you can take. This latest storm brought in some potent winds from the northwest, so the best snow was actually on the SE slopes.

Here's Aaron dropping a knee in the pow.



And a great view over to mighty Willard Peak.



Since we chose a southeast facing shot we had to do a little bit of traversing to get back to Cutler Ridge proper. After regaining the ridge, we tried to hug the south side of it for the best snow. Here's Dave enjoying a nice section lower down the ridge.



And Aaron doing his tele thing.



Funny thing about today was that out of the six of us touring, five were engineers or soon to be engineers and they were all on tele skis. I was the lone none engineer and the only person on an AT setup, specifically Dynafits, the lightest and greatest binding ever made. I like to think that that makes me smarter than the engineers :)