boy, that was a close one...

One of the handful of hills I've called home over the years. Family still has a place there and I get up for free hour turns (first hour is free at Okemo, no ticket required) during whatever winter visits I can manage. I actually had first chair on that lift when they installed it.

the best part was the 15-hour drive from Richmond, VA

the best part was the 15-hour drive from Richmond, VA 

Hhhmmm... That sounds like a low joy-o-meter reading.

can some one please refresh the Joy-o-Meter formula for me?

That picture reminds me of my first visit to Utah back in '94. I called around all the snow lines and most reported a base between 70-85" so I figure the conditions must be ok. It was March of '94 and I didn't know anything about the Utah resorts so I just headed up to the Park City area. When I arrived to PC I found a big sign in the parking lot "No Snowboards Allowed at Park City". Well, I headed back down the road 4 miles to Park West which did allow boards. The interesting thing I found is the reported base depth was nowhere near what was reported on the radio. All sun facing slopes were dirt or sagebrush, and all north facing slopes had 2'-4' of snow. It was the weirdest conditions I had ever seen, and the place was still packed. They had made a snow path on the lower slopes to get you to the lift, but the snow was very very dirty and the bottom of my board at the end of the day was black.

Well, it was my introduction to the Greatest Snow on Earth and it seemed a lot like Snoqualmie at the time. Riding up the lift we were going over bare dirt which remided me of that photo.

Jack, When I lived in Alta, we'd sometimes get dumps, where Park City etc. would get, well, not much. Alta set a 24-hour snowfall record that year; outside of Little & Big Cottonwood Canyons, hardly anything fell. (We were doing flips off of 2nd-story balconies into the snow below.)

As an aside, the link below is to a photographer who worked at the same lodge I did -- if you look at the third row of photos down, then the first three in that row (this one):



That's Mt. Superior letting go big-time after they dropped charges from a helicopter.

Three photo avy sequence

There was something like 6+ feet of snow that fell that storm. And, very oddly for Alta, it actually rained before snowing...

-Hans