Tag: wasatch
Little Cottonwood Canyon – Hurry Up & Wait
This line of stopped cars heading up Little Cottonwood Canyon road looks, smells and feels like a traffic jam, but there’s far more to it than just that. At the heart of the problem is that the Little Cottonwood Canyon (LCC) road is a narrow, winding, steep, two-lane mountain road which is threatened by 36+ [...]
Wasatch Gets Back to Basics
I think almost every run we took today would qualify as \”best turns of the year to date.\” Not that it was absolutely off the hook, but it was pretty damn good in a 12\” of dry fluff on a mixed base kind of way. The layers underneath have set up enough to be supportable, [...]
Crossing the Cardiac Rubicon
Forget avalanches, tree wells, blinding snow storms or helicopters dropping bombs on you – one of the scariest parts of skiing in Cardiac Bowl (upper Mill D drainage) is coming across the enraged snowmobilers. But you say, I thought this entire area was non motorized, except of course for helicopters? It is, at least for [...]
Wasatch Prepares for Beheading
Utah politics has positioned the Wasatch backcountry for its final death blow. Currently there is not one, not two, not even three, but NINE ski area expansions in the works. In the past these expansionist fantasies were thwarted by factors such as public input (90 plus percent are opposed), NEPA regulations, drinking water concerns, local [...]
3D Topo Maps
The first (and most likely only) time I went on a CMH trip, it gushed rain for the entire week. This was a tragedy and the lodge staff said that they had never seen anything like it in their entire history. One of the saving graces was that I got to spend a lot of [...]
\”Breaking Trail\” review
I walked out of Brewvies theater last night after watching \”Breaking Trail\” expecting snow on the ground and found dry, hot asphalt instead. Arrrg – pace thyself. As penance, I swore it was going to be a crappy season with no skiing until early January.
Talisker Proposed Tram in Living Color
After being berated by Talisker\’s tram lobbyist, Ted Wilson, I thought I should go up to the area in question and check it out myself to see if I was over-reacting to the issue. I don\’t think I was.
Derail the Coaster Rally
Ever since I moved back to Utah 20 years ago, Snowbird has been aggressively pursuing physical expansion of the resort to the point that it is almost nothing new. On the Park City side of the Wasatch Mountains, most of the land is privately owned so development is a foregone conclusion, which has led to [...]
Dave Hanscom, Alexis Kelner & Wasatch Tours 0
When I first got into backcountry skiing in the Wasatch, people were always referring to runs that were \”in the book,\” which unfortunately was out of print. You either had one, went skiing with someone who did, or figured it out on your own. I\’d given up hope of ever getting a copy of the [...]
SkiLink\’s Footprint
Last Thursday I had a chance to head up to Big Cottonwood Canyon and tour through the proposed Talisker SkiLink route. The actual details of this Wasatch abomination have been kept quite, or at least from public view, but by locating the beginning and end points, I was able to generate GPS waypoints of where [...]
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