Catching the corn before Winter returns.

My brother recently visited from our old home of Steamboat Springs Colorado with a couple of over-sized grown up toys to play with in the spring  like conditions of the Wasatch! Thanks to his wife for loaning her Specialized Fatboy to my wife, I then secured a Salsa Mukluk from the cool folks at Go-Ride sports. Conditions were mere guess work as this is a fairly new sport here and finding "daily ride" conditions is really hard. It only took about a mile of dry road before we got onto snow and even though we had a late start conditions were now great for the 4.7 inch tires with 6 psi.

The views are very impressive from the road, but we were hoping to find some firm corn which would allow for an almost endless choice of routes. Due to our late start, the higher we went the warmer the snow was feeling and the less our options became.

We stuck to the snowmobile tracks as these had the most stable base to keep us floating, but once we hit the highway summit we realized our tour was hitting it's return mode. The next day would change dramatically with lower temperatures and a lake effect[ storm.

Wow, what a day can do in the mountains! We actually made it to the summit of Guardsmen pass in the blizzard and decided the visibility was only getting worse, plus we were both ready to dry out,warm up and find some breakfast.

Meanwhile, back in the valley we had to get Blue out on at least one trail as the Wasatch canyons are all watersheds and do not allow dogs up any of them. The reliable Bonneville shoreline trail is always fun and even funnerer on a Fatty!

It's skiing like April

I truly don't have anything to complain about in the BIG picture, so I will try to sound optimistic on this short post. Even with the lack of fresh snow deposits on a consistent basis and above "normal" temperatures the higher ground always holds a revitalizing sense of place. Today at Solitude Mountain Resort I watched these 2 ski patrollers scaling Fantasy ridge to test the snow stability of the honeycomb cliffs.

While we couldn't wait for them to summit my new skier athlete friend Jason and I went to see how the 3" dusting would play out this beautiful morning.

Solitude is home to a ton of these twisted, gnarled Bristle cone pines that can be great for a backdrop of powder skiing. Real fun snow for just a few inches.