This post is brought to you by Utah, home of The Greatest Snow On Earth®. With 11 ski resorts less than an hour from Salt Lake City International Airport, there’s plenty of powder for the perfect ski vacation.
Day 1
We arrived at Powder Mountain just in time. The road was still open and lifts still spinning after 6” the night before. Hungry for powder, we didn’t even stop for groceries on the way up — this would turn out to be a bad decision, as the storm was just setting in. We met up with good friend and Marketing Director at Powder Mountain, Patrick Lundin, who guided us into the goods for an awesome first day. Little did we know, the lifts would not be turning for the rest of our time at Powder Mountain Resort.
Day 2
Awakening to the deep rumbling of avalanche control after a night of howling wind against our small mountainside condo, we geared up to find out what was going on. Good friend Kyle Clancy just barely managed to squeak up the road to join us before it closed for the day, along with the chairlifts. Luckily, the Summit Series folks were also snowed in and out in force for a day of catskiing. They kindly let us in on the action, and we lapped some awesome low-angle tree runs all day long.
Day 3
Deja vu, except this time we’d run out of the bacon and oatmeal we’d salvaged from the ski lodge freezer. The cats weren’t running, the road was still not open, and the 4+ feet of snow outside the condo had incapacitated almost every car in the parking lot. As ski patrol worked hard to mitigate the avalanche danger, we messed around on snowbank side-hits, adventured out on splitboards and powsurfers, and watched our fair share of Olympic ice skating.
Day 4
The three-day blizzard we called “PowMageddon” was clearing, and the hordes of powder hounds were finally let up the road, but our appetite for a fresh meal and new scenery got the best of us. As the first chairs were being loaded, we were on our way down the road to what would be an all-time bluebird day at neighboring Snowbasin. Fresh blue air and light blower snow made for an amazing day on what’s perhaps the best kept secret in Utah.
After four solid days in the midst of Northern Utah’s biggest winter storm, we needed no more convincing of why they call it the Greatest Snow on Earth. 