UTAH RESORTS (ALMOST) CLOSED
There's one week left of ski/snowboard season in Utah. Snowbasin and Brighton are open daily, Alta will open for the weekend, and then it's over, despite the fact that there's still 10 feet of snow on the ground, the kind of snow in the middle of April that resorts would kill for in December.
Because of the snow, closing day on April 13 in Park City was incredible, including the guy who paraglided off Park City Mountain Resort's Jupiter Peak, which is the highest skiable resort terrain in PC. All three resorts, PCMR, Deer Valley and The Canyons are still thickly covered, top to bottom.
The thick layer of white stuff didn't even get soft until the afternoon of closing day. "In the morning, it was like January snow," said former U. S. ski team downhiller Holly Flanders.
"We're at about 120 inches of snow. It's been an awesome year, but at this time of year, it doesn't matter how much snow you have, after Easter, people stop skiing," said Coleen Reardon, Deer Valley's Director of Marketing.
There's also a new tradition taking place at PCMR, an imitation of Alta's closing day crowd at High Rustler; but this one's on PCMR's Jupiter Peak, and it's a little harder to get to. The High Rustler event, which will take place again on Alta's closing day of April 20, is alkways crowded with about a thousand more people than were on Jupiter, perhaps because High Rustler can be reached via a simple traverse (though watch out for the whoop-de-doos!). Getting up to the top of Jupiter means a 20-30 minute climb from the top of McConky's lift. Once the climb is made, it's easy to feel like you're at the top of the world, on a fairly small, flat area higher than anything else. The only thing that can be seen are snowy mountain peaks, but none as high as the one you are on.
Sunday, closing day, was the first really warm day of the year, so the snow was not yet wet and still had its structure. That was a good thing for the people who skied or rode off the peak. Courage is needed to make that first turn, because the top of Jupiter is long and (if there is such a thing) triple black diamond steep in all directions. In fact, the flattest section was the climb to the top.
Flanders, who conducts her popular Women's Workshop ski clinics at The Canyons, had taken some early runs there. "It was really good. Off on the north side, there were still some freshies from a storm earlier in the week. You could ski all the way to the bottom and it wasn't getting thin," she said.
Deer Valley, the most consistent NASTAR venue in Utah, ran the public race even on closing day. The resort's NASTAR operation deserves major kudos, it has a good and always well maintained course, accurate pacesetting, and it operates every day on the posted opening and closing times.
Reardon says about the consistency, "We pride ourselves on providing a great guest experience, and we don't close things just because we slow down a bit, we try to provide the same experience in April as we do in March.
Reardon has been with the ski area 14 years, and has seen it grow into a world destination resort, one of only three in America that still does not allow snowboards (Another is Alta). She says, "There has been significant growth and change. With the addition of Empire Canyon, we're just short of 2,000 acres now."
But despite all the snow still on the ground, forget about poaching any of those acres.
"It's dangerous, so we don't allow it. Poachers will be caught and asked to leave the mountain," Reardon says.
But one daredevil earlier this year won $5,000 for poaching. Park City snowboarder Andrew Braden took up a challenge by Burton, when the snowboard company offered a $5,000 prize to the first snowboarder to poach any of the resorts that still did not allow riders and make a video of it. The rules were that snowboarders had to buy a lift ticket and had to be polite. Deer Valley rules are that anyone riding the lifts must be wearing ski boots.
Braden hid his snowboard boots and bindings, and put ski bindings on his snowboard, telling the lift attendant he was on a new kind of monoski. Once off the lift, he skied into the trees, put his own bindings on his board and changed into snowboard boots. Then he put on a white tee-shirt on which he had spray painted a bight pink peace sign and rode down the mountain.
Burton not only awarded him the five thou, but another company chipped in an additional $1,250.