This morning, Tim and I woke up at 7:00 am after 4 hours to sleep to the shots of a howitzer. It was the official opening of 429-apalooza!
It was also Alta doing avalanche patrol. The road into Little Cottonwood Canyon is the most avalanche prone road in the US. Usually small slides are triggered which never hit the road, but occasionally a big one comes down. The Canyon is very narrow so the resort buildings which are in avalanche paths are made of concrete in case an avalanche hits. Another precaution the locals take is interlodge. When an interlodge alert is called, the avalanche danger is extremely high. If any person is caught outside during interlodge, they are immediately fined $300, no questions asked. So when we woke up this morning at the Peruvian the door was chained closed. We heeded their warning and decided to eat breakfast instead of venturing outside during interlodge.
Meanwhile Jimmy Haushchild, Kevin and Georgia Frazier, Casey and Mark Weiser, and Mel and Dave (Chico) Viscovich were on their way to the ski area to enjoy a epic day of powder! Once interlodge was lifted and the roads reopened, we all joined up at the base of Alta for an incredible ski day. There were 11 new inches and though the mountain was crowded we got plenty of fresh shots. Our picture of the day is our ski group during our apres ski after a phenomenal day!
We then headed home for quick showers before meeting up with Trish to head up to Deer Valley for the World Cup Freestyle Aerials Competition. We all agreed that watching these guys jump on TV doesn’t begin to capture how impressive their jumps are live. They performed bewildering combinations like a lay, tuck, tuck, triple and full full doubles. All I know is I don’t know how they survived any jump at all!
The competition was followed up by a free concert by Hell’s Belles. Hell’s Belle’s are a energetic AC/DC cover band from Seattle. The thing that makes them particularly unusual is unlike AC/DC, the band is all girls! It was 20 degrees, very cold, but these girls braved the cold with T-Shirts and short skirts. It looked very cold, but we couldn’t have asked for a better band to celebrate 429-apalooza with us!
Our night was wrapped up with a fireworks display at the top of the mountain. A phenomenal day!
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