Johnny Law

It was incredible and surprisingly quiet, real icing on the cake type moment.

Clearly I wasn't being 100% serious though Keystone probably doesn't have much more of a base and I'm pretty Jackson didn't either when you were there.

It all started years ago while having one of those skiing days dreams in the car, it was gnar gnar steep and large 50 ft rocks faces littered the exits of the dream gully's. It quickly earned the title of century line as we couldn't believe it would ever see enough snow to be ski-able more than once every hundred years. As we all know the stars aligned and mother nature blessed us with 24" of thick creamy pow on top of 8" of cement. Calls were made, other more reasonable options were discussed but with a once in a lifetime snow event we knew we would end up on century. Piss poor local plowing efforts forced us to far less desirable route that would quickly end up being what seemed like a never ending slog uphill. I've BC toured from Alta to the Adirondacks and with one exception I have never been more physically drained then at the end of this tour. Four miles and 6 hours of energy zapping skinning and we had finally made it. The skiing was fantastic, heavy but I'm not sure you could ski it any other way. It almost saddens me to think I may never get another chance at this line........though if it snows Monday...... I have to apologize for the lack of pics and clandestine nature of this report. One we were straight up beat and two the gentlemen who own the land on the approach were pretty apprehensive about having people on their land so we promised to keep it secret. I like to share stashes as much as I can, I mean if riders from PA don't look out for each other who the hell will but them the breaks sometimes. A pretty nice place to rest our weary bones. That line is giving me a boner If I woke up at the top of this line I would definitely think I'm in Smuggler's Notch (the actual Notch not the resort) before PA. Waist deep in PA, previous to this trip that was only possible in my dreams A pretty damn good route out though I wonder how often the trains run Pretty often Thanks for looking hope you had a great couple of days too. I believe we just saw a train get face shots

You can still drive on 76/476 it isn't like there are police patrols or anything they just don't want to have to deal with stranded cars. If you have the right vehicle I'd leave now as it is only going to get worse. Years ago I was on 95 when it was "closed" kinda nice because your the only car on the road besides drunk plow drivers.

Epic day for Bear Creek its a strange strange season where Bear Creek has more snow than some western resorts. My only request is that you leave the big 3 (extreme, Sasquatch and whatever its called next to extreme) ungroomed for these once in 20 years type events. I don't think they were groomed this morning but you could tell they were groomed at some point, still epic morning.

X2 Anything beyond 72 hours is pure fantasy.

Those guys are insane......

Lots of retrograde going on, the longer the energy transfer takes the more time this storm moves north before the secondary low pushes it out to sea. Hopefully the secondary takes too long and the NE gets bombed. Its definitley slowing down as well along the interaction with the in place cold air mass, a stall with no secondary would turn this baby into a EC butt fucker......some how I don't think were that lucky....

That's actually good, I think, the union park one is seriously sketchy still I'd check the UTA website because its entirely possible I switched the places and Sandy's the one with the never operating bus stop. One time were it would be useful for DHarrisburg around and he's in some kind of self imposed exile....

Yeah I'm pretty damn sure your talking about Extended Stay Midvale which is a fucking dump, place is full of meth heads and welfare moms. There is the Crystal Inn at 818 East Winchester St. in Midvale and the ski bus picks up at their front door. Also studio 6 in midvale has a UTA ski bus stop at $39-45/night, with a kitchen. La Quinta in Midvale is 55ish a night and it's a 5 minute walk from the 7200 park and ride to pick up the bus. Motel 6 and little america are on 600 south which is in SLC and as is maybe 2 or 3 blocks from the train which takes you to the bus depot in sandy to go up the canyon. Snowpine would let you do the entire trip without a car, its more loot but your in the canyon and don't need a rental car. I've heard the food is actually pretty good. Meals and loding is like 105 for a dorm. The days in located in Midvale used to run a $49 special that included unlimited public transport and lift ticket. I don't even know if they are still there but you could find out. I'd just stay somewhere cheap that is actually near stuff and just get up early and park your car in the lots at the bottom of the canyons if its 4x4 and chains. UTA is decent but the bus sucks for riding where you have all kinds of stuff and it can be painfully slow if you get the wrong driver. Check liftopia for cheap tickets of pick them up at Canyon Sports. The canyon resorts is offering some $100 2 tickets 2 beers 2 burgers thing too.

Dude I think the extended stay your talking about has a bus station that only runs twice a day and its like a mile from the bus stop. So even if you make the one bus in the morning you may not make the one back to that stop. Friday and Saturdays you get alot of people riding the buses back out the canyon so even though your done at 4 you may not be able to get on a bus until 5:30 and then you missed your one chance and have to walk 6 miles through beautiful sandy. Give me a few minutes and I'll check on the above.

Rebel hill is way better than the park, check it out...

I may have missed this but R2D2 why don't you drive ?

Didn't you just post on the previous page a story that said all was well in interwest land ?

The difference is between the GFS and NAM model, the NAM says warmer storm more qpf 30" in philly. GFS says get the fuck out of here all that baja energy is going in the ocean and therefore 6-12". Because of the way the fucking polar jets are setup VT and co will see fuck all from this which really sucks.

lulz...unless you are kicking it old old old school like with wood skis some of that isn't right. One UHMWPE (definitely screwed that acronym up) doesn't absorb water at all, the holes are too small. If your smart you can see where this is going, well then how the hell does the wax get in there. Nobody knows, Swix, all the crazy ski racing teams have looked at this in a highly scientific way and nobody can figure it out. Something is going on because the ski is definitely faster and you can see the extra weight if you weigh them but bottom line is nobody knows. There are two types of bases, extruded and sintered. Extruded are more durable and cheap so think rental fleet most decent skis are sintered. The difference is in the pore make up, extruded is 60% closed 40% porous, sintered is pretty much the opposite. The current thought is that wax somehow adheres to the porous cells and hence why you go faster. Floru layups outside of racing are retarded don't pay the extra loot for 20 seconds of use. High level racing like national team level stuff are excluded from the above those guys would put uranium in their bases if they went .00001 faster. For your average at home waxer base structure is probably more important than wax unless your AtomicJeff and know what your doing. Most shops have the machine set to crosshatch which in this area makes sense for the most part. However if you have a setup you only use out west or just generally like to get mach looney have them throw down a linear base structure, if your shop doesn't know what that is find a new shop. Finally there is some discussion in the scientific studies of waxing that have found that wax does exactly bull shit and structure and removal of ptex hair is what makes you go faster. Nobody knows for sure but it seems to work so I'll keep waxin.

Update: Panorama sold, squaw on the way, lots of talk about vail purchasing Winter Park which would probably suck. In Jackson, Wyo.,

That's very true, too many places fucked up and oriented everything in a way where you only get to ski half the hill. I don't want to have to ride 4 lifts to ride the whole hill.

In pa it really doesn't matter because we are all skiing the same hard pack but anywhere that actually gets snow the opposite is actually better. The snow simply sticks around longer because the double can't put as many people on the hill as a six pack. Old school hills with lots of slow chairs actually limit the total number of riders by default, MRG will never see the same numbers as the Bush because if they did nobody would ever get up the hill. People would say fuck MRG its too crowded and simply not come back. There are few hills that were the riding remains good even on a full capacity day. Vail may have the acerage, maybe Pow Mow but that place never sees a full house anyways.

Sounds like another good day. Stay with the big planks they make it much easier to ski thicker/mank/crud snow. Really anything under 95 isn't needed, if you can't carve a 95 ski you can't carve and the extra float and power will take some strain off the legs.

FKNA man! First real cliff, slackcountry, big pow days, good crew to ride with...I don't know your age or your responsibilities at home but you should stay out there. Incredible trip...really makes you think....

That is certainly possible but for the vast vast majority of lifts the lift itself has no idea where the chair is on the line. Instead some smart guy sat down and did a bunch of math that says if the haul line moves this fast and the detach/loading line runs at this speed how far do we need space the chairs so that we don't overload the detach line. What your talking about is kinda a smart lift where a computer would tell the chair when to depart the lift house, while I'm sure its possible it would probably be very expensive and suffer increased shut downs as all that equipment would be outside in some pretty poor weather. Bear Creek actually looked into putting a HSQ in and my recollection is they faced the same problem of not having a long enough haul line. If you pm BC-Mark I would bet he can give you some more information. In general I don't understand some skiers obsession with high speed lifts, I'll take 10 quality runs on a slow fixed grip double over 20 shitty runs of a six pack. I can think of very few mtns that have the acreage to handle that kind of uphill capacity even on the deepest pow days.

I don't do lift ops for a living so if I butchered this my fault but this is the way it was described to me by my cousin who ran a hill and a buddy who works for Mad River lifts, the company not the ski hill. Most lifts are respaced yearly look up at the haul line next time your on a lift and most of the time you'll see a little marker of spray paint. That mark is where that chair started at, there are a number of different factors but slowly over time even fixed grip chairs move their position on the haul line. Obviously you can't run a lift with all the chairs in a big mass unless the chair was designed to be run that way, so every once in a while you have to get out there and move the chairs into proper spacing. If the haul line is too short(I don't know what the exact figure is) on a detachable lift the chairs will start to bunch on the haul line because of the delay in the loading and unloading obviously this leads to the lift being unbalanced which is a big no no. The time the chair has to spend in the lift house is fixed because people can only load and unload at a certain speed, move too fast and your shutting the lift down all the time. Therefore you either run the haul line at reduced speed which kinda defeats the purpose of highspeed or you space the chairs so far apart that overall uphill capacity is actually lower than with the fixed grip. Gondolas bunch at the lift house because the time they need to spend there is substantial but the hangers on a gondy are pretty advanced as are the control systems and they are respaced every time they get back on the haul line. Snowbasin actually removes each gondy from the lift every night to store them in an underground facility, its been awhile but I believe k1 at Killy stores each carriage at the bottom as well. Clearly the same could be done for a quad or sixpack but you could just build 3 lifts for what that would cost. Most fixed grips actually have the ability to run as fast as highspeeds but because they don't detach at the lift house mad people would be crashing on the load so some resorts have installed conveyor systems. Alta's supreme has one and since the conveyor is doing all the work you can run the lift at a much higher speed. These systems are popular in Europe but expensive. I know there is a youtube video of the conveyor in action but it was named something weird and I can't find it. edit: apparently the put one in at snow

Nice man! 22 and Granite Chief are skiing royalty sounds like a great day. Squaw is a top five in terms of lift accessed gnar...

Just a note you can't run high speed chair with a haul line that short, every other day you would have to be spraying and re spacing the chairs. If you ever done a chair spacing you know a small lift can take a few days so I highly doubt Sno is ever picking up a high speed chair for a 500 vert lift.