FINDING SOLITUDE: Avoid holiday crowds, head to smaller resorts
It’s possibly the worst feeling for a 100-day-a-year skier. You arrive at your home resort and see the lift line snaking out the maze. That’s when it hits you. It’s President’s Day or MLK weekend, or some other 3-day holiday when the high rises empty out and the lemmings flock to the mountains for a ski break.
By and large, this isn’t a bad thing. Ski resorts need skiers, and lemmings need to hurl themselves off cliffs. And where better to throw your body off a precipice than at America’s snow-enshrouded ski resorts? But for you this means lift lines, crowded slopes, and lemming tracks chopping up the landing of your favorite air. The solution? Take a little ski vacation of your own, away from the big resort you have to yourself 90% of the year to the untracked stashes hiding in the shadows.
Only a ridge away from the buzz of Little Cottonwood Canyon lies some of the best pristine powder in Utah. This is where Powdermag.com decided to spend our Martin Luther King weekend, searching for fresh turns and solitude at the resort that bears that name. After saving major coin with $65 JetBlue tickets, we decided to ride in style up Big Cottonwood. We arranged a private ride in a plush GMC Denali from Resort Transportation (utahskiguide.com), and made it worthwhile by using the 20-minute courtesy stop to stock up on groceries.
Eight inches of fresh awaited the lucky few who woke up in Big Cottonwood Thursday morning. As we skated up to Powderhorn, the old fashioned double base chair provided a beautiful site—an empty maze. Middle Slope, the gladed cliff area skier’s right of Powderhorn offered deep first turns, with plenty to play off. A creaky ride up Summit, another retro double, brought us to Solitude’s 10,035-foot summit and to the Honeycomb Canyon traverse, the ’Tude’s prize jewel. It took some willpower to traverse pass the numerous opportunities for fresh, but the extra pole was worth it—the Boundary Chutes were epic. Fresh lines were found in Honeycomb, the Black Forest, and Here Be Dragons until 3:00.
