basin today (AKPM-esque inbounds TR: you have been warned!)
Thank God for March. After one of the most foreigner-infested seasons at basin EVER, the SLC folks seem to be gone along with most of the other tourists. The real key, though, was that the expat rippers from LCC have apparently given up, :) :) :) , leaving the mountain to those of us who are slower and perhaps less inclined to fight for our lines.
At any rate, after some really fun runs down porky and meeting up with Flyk briefly, I went inside to have a leisurely lunch while route after route was run on no name. No other good gates were going to drop anyway, so why not wait? Besides, I'd already had several large helpings of mid-weight windblown powder topped with a few inches of noisy graupel... those gates were the key to the best snow.
Eventually, having downed my bowl of tomato bisque (the best soup they make... if only it wasn't just once a week) soup and sat around bored as hell for almost an hour, I figured I might as well see if they were ever going to drop any ropes. As it happened, the patrollers boarding the tram just as I walked up were headed to open gate 2. Not ideal, but good enough for me.
Got to just above the gate and stopped for a few pictures of random stuff, and met up with an old off-duty patroller guy who figured since we were the only ones around we should head down together. Sound advice, I'm sure...
We shot out across the traverse, dodging under a few rock bands that were buried a month ago, and emerged mid-way down no-name with a wide opened untracked shot below us. The other guy ("the dude" from now on) graciously let me lead the way, and from the first turn I was plunging through deep, light snow with faceshots at every turn. As I picked up speed the smooth, unblemished surface allowed even my out-of-shape ass to glide through huge fast turns without feeling at any moment that I was out of control.
At the end of the face and after traversing over to another shot, the dude and I stopped to talk and rest for a bit, which turned into a 15 minute "oh, we went to the same high school? I graduated 20 years before you, but do you know joe smith? I think he has kids your age, blahblahblah". In that time, no one else came down behind us.
Eventually we sacked up and did the last bit to the manky runout, but still didn't see anyone until we were on the drag lift out at the bottom. It really felt like the "old snowbasin" of a few years ago. I went home confident that all the lines I wanted would be waiting for me tomorrow, and indeed the view from the parking lot revealed our tracks still alone up there aside from a few patrol cuts.
Apologies to Flyk and Stoy for not knowing the names of all these places... I rarely need to explain where I'm going so it's just "over there further past that one tree" or "by the rock that has the log" or stuff like that. I'm sure there is a name for every bush I passed. ;)
Here are a few random views from the day... not very exciting without photosluts, but oh well.
So Porky was nice... the short tree shots to the left were untouched (as was the main face, but a few laps over there was enough). Shooting through a tree tunnel to make the traverse was the most exiting part, though.
http://www.back-pack.org/ninja/PM/ba...5/porkyphb.jpg
While waiting for gates to open, I noticed that they hadn't pushed the snow off these tables yet... a fair bit of snow there:
http://www.back-pack.org/ninja/PM/ba...05/jptable.jpg
Just above the gate it was pretty socked in:
http://www.back-pack.org/ninja/PM/ba...-05/nntree.jpg
And then, miraculously, it cleared up as soon as we finished the traverse. Given, you can't see much from this bottom-up view, but we came in about 1/2 way down the main face off no-name:
http://www.back-pack.org/ninja/PM/ba...3-21-05/nn.jpg
I can't wait for tomorrow. :)
