The Plan
Being that our first day of the trip is a Sunday, after discussing it a bit we decided to hit Snowbasin, which is north of Salt Lake City, as opposed to east which is where most of the resorts are located. By all accounts, this location gets the fewest number of people on weekends. But it’s still highly rated, which is good. The rest of the day would be breakfast (before) and dinner (after).
For real, that’s it.
The Drive
One of the coolest things about traveling is seeing a different world, Different signs, stores, roads, and so on. The coolest thing about Utah is the landscape. Driving up route 15 then east on 84 exposes us to a totally different landscape than we’re used to. Absolutely stunning scenery on the drive up.
As we started up 84 there was a freight train coming up along the road we were driving on. The canyons are the way to get through the mountains which exist because some river cut the canyon over the last million (I am guessing) years. This was the case here as well.
Also, freight trains are cool.
Snowbasin
We got there early and got a good parking spot, which was awesome. The lifts opened up at 9 but we were there around 8:20, so we had time to get ready and hit the bathroom, The gondola started rolling a few minutes early and the line moved fast. We were all able to ride up, which was cool.
Snow was coming in today so the visibility was a little tough to start. The snow was great, but it was hard to see much of anything. That said, not being on the east coast meant that there wasn’t ice all over the place. In fact, the only patch we hit was a few feet of not awful ice, all day.
So ok, we couldn’t see anything but the snow was, well it was snow. This made it all the better when skiing in a direction we couldn’t see.
At one point I ended up on a double black diamond bowl area and it was way over my head. When we got to the bottom I was sweating like a pig – assuming pigs sweat.
They opened the Strawberry gondola at some point and we hit that side, and it was the absolute best run of the day. We all loved it. So we took that gondola up and we were dumped into an absolute horrid wind storm with absolutely no visibility, to the point that D and I were both getting vertigo-like symptoms, D was worse than me, having to stop a few times to catch her breath, It was bad.
We cobbled our way down the mountain, going from neon sign to neon sign to make it. This was rough, as the ground seemed to be moving when we were stopped. Crazy stuff. Later, the woman at the gift shop would tell us that side is known for this.
Maybe it was some altitude sickness playing into this, who knows. Regardless, we stopped at the end of this run and took a break, and this ended up being the end of our day. Alex and Mark pulled the plug, and we did the same. A few runs later the boys called it a day and we packed up and drove home,
The Strava link can be found here.
The Conclusion
Driving back from the resort wasn’t too bad, even though we were all tired. As we got closer to the house the skies opened up and the view of the mountains with the sun shining on them. Amazing.
The rest of the day was hanging out at the house talking, eating, and eating more. We had burgers, veggies, and salad for dinner. And all sorts of snacks.
We discussed the next day but came up with no firm conclusions about what the plan is. We’ll see when we get up.
Traveling Normandy 