Alta Backcountry

June 3rd, 2011 was one sweet spring day. Even though Summer is only 17 days away the skiing at Snowbird in still EPIC! I got to ski Pipeline today for the first time ever. The video sucked so I didn’t put it in the edit. The best part of the day was skiing Mineral with Charlie, Crazy Ray, ERic Fabbri and Becky Hall. We sacked up and hit the Hoop Gap today which we have been looking at for weeks. It is a crazy little air through a steel triangle created by a lift tower and a support beam. Tim Normand deserves the credit for discovering the Hoop Gap earlier this year. Good Times!!!

Getting up early usually sucks, but today it was not all that bad. Not being hungover helped a lot. I met my old buddy Jason France up at Alta at 6:55am and we got to hiking. The snow where we dropped in, Nipple to Hidden Chute, was fresh and strange. It was a super fun ride down, but it was a balancing act to not break through the weird layer that was under the top couple inches of cream pow. I got a ski under it in the last few feet of the runout to the rope tow and it did not work out well. Enjoy…

Patsy Marley was an easy woman to get with back in the day all you needed was some dough. To ski Patsy today a little moretakes more work. It was a long hard slog up Grizzly today to get to the goods. I had to break about 50% of the skin through a foot or so of the most Tahoe style damp pow we have seen in a while. The skiing down was prime. Again I focused on skiing fast and trending to the right to avoid getting balled up in a wet slide. It worked out well. Enjoy…

The beginning of Gavin’s edit shows how his runins with Femur Rock went this winter. I think there was a record for the most people to ever hit Femur in a year this year. Even snowboarders were sending it after Robert Hurley showed what was possible during the North Face Masters event. Gavin is a good kid and he skis with a lot more power than any other 18 year old I know. He still has a lot to learn, but with his strength and stoke I think he will be a player in the Snowbird scene for a long time to come. Enjoy…

The history I have heard is that Patsy Marley, that beautiful West facing zone at the top of LCC ,was named after an old time prostitute from Alta back in the gold mining days. Whether that is true or not is hard to prove. I was able to prove to myself at least that the snow up there is pretty damn nice. Way better than the mogul field still lurking under the new pow on High Rustler.

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Last Monday Pipeline went down for the first time all season at Snowbird. A combination of bad timing and general spring laziness has kept me from ever getting to ski the Pipeline. It is usually open only a few days in the late spring and often the gate is only open for the first few trams in the morning. Last week however there were a couple days where patrol let the lucky folks that were up those days rip it up all day long. I would like to personally, and on behalf of all the riders of Snowbird, thank Mr. Jimmy Collinson and the rest of the patrol.
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Theguys from Panda Poles know how to have a good time and they also know a lot about the extremely technical world of ski tuning. They have blended these two passions to create Shop Talk. Shop Talk is a multi episode how-to guide for anyone who is interest in the behind the scene life of a ski shop worker at Superior Ski and Boot. Tanner, O-WA and Mr. Kent Hyden help to inform you on the finer points of the great art of tuning. Enjoy and feel free to laugh out loud in your cubical. Watch all the episodes by clicking read more below…

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My new favorite guy from Jersey, Jay Dash, sent me these images from today at Alta. I got up later in the day and it was not quite as fluffy. … Read More

Oakley White-Allen is a great dude and a great skier. His newest edit for Panda Poles will prove to you that he can ski better backwards than you can forwards. The guy even has a cliff named after him in the Amphitheater. Not bad for a hog farmer from Maine, eh?

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Dave has been good enough to send us several videos over the last couple months. I believe he is a member of the elusive Alta Snowboard Team headed by one Mr. Mica Bownlie. This video was all shot on the first on the 1st of May. That is right kids May 1st! While all the other resorts are getting ready for mountain bike season and all the transient resort workers are trying to figure out what they are going to do for the summer….again, Snowbird is still straight crushing it! Enjoy…