Posts Tagged park city mountain resort
Powder Easter
Nothing like hiding Easter eggs in the snow for the kids. While they are running around looking for eggs, the avalanche bombs are going off all along the Wasatch Back. 14″ of fresh reported by PCMR this morning, but I wasn’t in line when the ropes dropped for Jupiter. Instead, I kicked back with an extra cup of joe, and let the kids have their fun. I finally made it to the hill with the little girl in tow, just a daddy daughter day at PCMR. No fighting for a parking spot on Easter Sunday. We had our fair share of kiddie pow, and managed to burn through Detonator, my daughter’s favorite run, when it’s not icy. Today it was all filled in with fresh snow, and my little ripper had a blast. We made our way down to the bottom as things were starting to warm up and get heavy, and made a stop for ice cream at Yellow Snow, where my daughter had “Peeps” ice cream. That’s right, ice cream with those little technicolor marshmallow birds mixed in. Happy Easter.
Detonator at Park City Mountain Resort
Locals Links
Here are 2 new sites for you to check out: Yellow Snow Ice Cream, and Park City Crash Pads. These are 2 locally-owned Park City businesses, and we want to give them a shout out.
Yellow Snow is an ice cream and coffee house located in Prospector, next to another locals’ fave, Fuego (right next to the old Prospector liquor-teria, which is no longer open to the public, but serves as a booze dispensary for the town’s restaurants). Yellow Snow is open crazy hours, something like 6 am to 11 pm. Kids love the ice cream, it’s all homemade, and they come up with some original flavors.
Park City Crash Pads is a new take on resort property management, started by an industry veteran who lost his job when one of the other outfits in town sucked all the money from their condo owners last season, and then blamed the misfortune on the economy (even though Utah skier visits were down only 3% from the prior year, what the hell). Crash Pads is not the same old same old. Their angle is to take on properties that are “mature”, a nice way of saying older and not Deer Valley, but still cozy, and reinvent the ski trip experience. Their new website tells the story way better than we can here, so check them out. They are also building up a nice little following on Facebook.
Day 1 Is In The Books
What’s up, Skids? Are you ready for the ski season? I am. I didn’t make it to opening day of the season at PCMR on Saturday, but went up on Sunday. Felt good to be back on snow. I took my 5 year old up for her first turns of the season. We parked down in the lower lot, and the little ticket booth was closed. Damn. Didn’t want to hike all the way up to the Plaza to get a free ticket for the little one, that would have been a bad start. The ticket checker folks solved the problem, as a nice young lady named Steph had some tickets with her (they are free for the little ones, under 6, I believe). She even offered to clip off the bouquet of last year’s tickets that were dangling from my daughter’s jacket. It made her smile, and that’s why we do it, isn’t it? The conditions were what you should expect for a pre-Thanksgiving opening, so no complaints. After a few runs on First Time, my daughter was starting to pick up where she left off from last season. Worth it. What about you? Did you get out there this weekend?
Ski Utah Gold Pass
So, let’s say you just won the lottery and you had some money to spend. Forget about that, let’s just say you wanted to take advantage of Utah’s winter bounty, and afford yourself the convenience of skiing where you damn want when you damn want. Ski Utah is once again offering up the Gold Pass for a cool $3,400. Say you plan on skiing 100 days plus this year. Wouldn’t it be great to chase the best snow? Most people struggle with scraping together enough jack just to get a local’s pass at one resort. If you are going to ski a lot, this thing makes sense. Plus, it’s direct-to-lift at the following: PCMR (includes Fast Tracks access), The Canyons, Snowbird, Alta, Solitude, Snowbasin, and Sundance. At the others, you just show it at the window and they give you a ticket. Ski Utah usually sells out of these. They are also transferable, so companies looking to provide ski privileges to employees could buy a couple Gold Passes and let employees sign them out. Get the whole skinny on this fat pass. And if $3,400 is out of your range, there is always the $2,300 Silver Pass, which gets you up to 30 days at all 13 Utah resorts. That’s what I’ll be rolling this season. Only bummer is this one is not transferable.
Park City Mountain Resort Extends Season
Just got a sweet Tweet from the PCMR Tweeps (@pcski) that the town’s mountain will extend their season by a week. New closing day effective today is Sunday, April 19th, according to the PCMR blog. This is good news for Skids who have season passes, another week to milk out extra value from hard earned dollars in the form of bonus vertical feet skied on the season. And we all know how hard it has been to earn dollars in this town this year. With property management companies that employee hundreds maybe thousands going titties-up, it’s good news to hear that the curtain will not close this weekend. This is a call out to all Skids to show up, ski some runs, drink some beers, buy some burgers on the mountain, and be happy that we get an extra week to slide around in the mountain’s bounty. Thanks, PCMR! In a time of uncertainty, I am certain I will squeeze in a few unexpected extra days.
The Groundhog is Pissed
Sunset over Wasatch Mountains
Spring.
This photo is what it looked like just last weekend in Park City, sun going down over the mountains looking west towards Kimball Junction from Old Ranch Road. Saturday was a great day for road biking, but funky and wet spring conditions at the resorts. The backcountry was non-existent. The groundhog was out, stretching his legs. Then Sunday came and we got a whopper of a winter storm. First it started warm and wet, then the temperatures dropped, and we had a week of winter weather. The crescendo was Wednesday night into Thursday, dumping over 2 feet of fresh on our three resorts. Maybe LCC and BCC racked up more inches than we did over on the Park City side of the Wasatch, but who cares. The skiing this week has been epic.
Waist deep powder at Deer Valley
Winter.
Thursday amounted to a great day to play hookey and get out on the mountain, with lots of pent-up demand from Skids who were not satisfied with hanging the skis and switching to spring mode. Reports from Skids correspondents at PCMR were boasting of waist deep powder replentishing itself run after run in Jupiter Bowl. Other Skids called or Tweeted from DV, where the wind made the deep snow heavy in places like Wasatch, Sultan, and Mayflower, but heavenly in the tree shots, and incredibly deep and luscious at Lady Morgan and Empire. I am sure there are some hurtin’ puppies tonight from a day spent rallying hard. The groundhog is pissed. There are more winter storms lined up, and it looks like this won’t be the last of winter in Park City.
More Unsettled Weather in the Wasatch
Sunday, March 22 was the supposed to be the chosen day for Natoconnect 2009, a slackcountry tour where a few hearty souls equipped with packs, beacons, shovels, probes and the all-important tickets to ride, Ski Utah Gold Passes, would hit Park City Mountain Resort, Solitude, Alta, Snowbird, Brighton, and a whole bunch of sweet lines in between, all in one day. Problem is, the weather looks dicey, and the group is unmotivated. Spring in the Wasatch has been warm the last 10 days, but there is a change coming for Sunday that could bring some big snow. We’re putting the adventure on hold to see what this storm brings, and hopefully we’ll pull it off sometime before April. I was looking forward to getting some sweet photos and video of this tour, but we’ll just have to wait and see what the weather has in store for the next few weeks. The question is, should this count as 5 days of skiing if we hit 5 resorts in one day, or does it just count for 1? I guess it will all depend on how good the snow is when we pull it off.