Ski Bum Poet

I’ve got some exciting news for Altafarians. Until now you’ve only been able to get yer hands on one of these classic t shirts while in Alta skiing it up, well Altaholics.com is now open for business! Buy Lee Cohen’s famous Altaholics Anonymous shirts online, quick and easy. The magnate himself has set up the store, and will be fulfilling your orders for the time being. So have at it. Here’s the story…

In December 1983 Alta got it’s one month record of 244 inches and members of the Creek Road House were in the midst of enjoying a most gratifying streak of voluntary unemployment.

After continuous days of faceshots and copious amounts of blower pow I turned to my buddy Duff and said “We are such #!*!# Altaholics.” We knew we had something. It took a year to do it but after much babbling the first Altaholics Anonymous Tees were finally made. -LC

For more info & to buy some shirts visit Altaholics.com…

Alright havin’ a little fun again with the old GravityFed classics. These articles I find and post are from back in the day, as they say ;). I always get excited when I stumble upon one of the great custom stories that were submitted to GravityFed pre-dot com bubble burst of 2001…and this is exactly what happened tonight. I found the old story, added it to GFed, then I posted to digg and Propeller. Here’s the snippet from digg.com:

The “Essence of the no pole movement.” This is an article pulled from the deep archives of the early GravityFed Network. It’s an entertaining read, and true look at a sub-ski culture, within a sub-ski culture at Alta. I wonder if these characters are still charging around the Wasatch!

Read the article at Gravityfed or digg this shizzle.

If you’re a gear head than chances are you’ve bought online a handful of times. And if you’re a web shopper you’re likely pretty good at finding the deals and gear on sale. Well here’s a site to note for all you savvy money saving gear head hippies out there: OGEBlog.com

OGEBlog is the official weblog of the Outdoor Gear Engine, a database that (at time of post) has over 300,000 product skus from over 60 of the Internet’s best outdoor stores. The mission of the site is simple. To offer up day-by-day pricing on the gear you need. With the tagline of “Price It, Buy It, Get Outside!” who woulda thunk that was it. But it is. It’s a gear search engine, and it’s sweeping the civilized world! No but seriously, here’s the word straight from OGE, Inc.:

Our site helps you compare prices. Don’t waste your time surfing the web looking for the best value. This is a price driven service from Wasatch gear heads. Through proprietary technology, OGE will display updated pricing each day for gear from the best outdoor merchants on the web. Bookmark OGE so you can find your gear quick, and get outside. more info…

Here are a couple of features on the web that support this killer service:

• PRWeb News: Outdoor Gear Price Comparison Service from OutdoorGearEngine.com
• Squidoo Price Comparison Lens: Compare Prices on Outdoor Gear

Oh and this is probably the most attractive part of the blog. With 60+ stores in the OGE database, there are a constant flow of sales, promotions, freebies, closeouts, coupons and frankly anything else that can save you some bucks on yo stuff…posted to the site. If you buy gear online, subscribe to their RSS Sale feed and you’ll save:

Subscribe to the sale category (the gear on sale category currently has 126 articles). Smart gear heads will find killer savings hitting this feed a few times per week.

OK so far so good with the AltaCam podcast series production schedule this season (hmm no season yet, though…that could be a problem). Two weeks ago we rolled out the Adam Clark interview, and now we’re featuring Johnny B’s interview with Caroline Gleich. Listen as Johnny Bernard and her talk skiing from the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. Powder days and much more.

Caroline Gleich: Have I ever needed ski patrol? Oh, yeah. One day at snowbird, three years ago, the Galande Competition. I was skiing down, the in run in the morning, it is an early morning training at 9:30 on the frozen coral reef. And some 190 atomic powder pluses, I wanted to ski those so I could get some extra lift off the jump.

And on my sixth jump, I had a funky take-off and I landed on one foot, tried to bring the other foot to match it, to ski the run out and I wrecked and I tumbled like 600 feet down the landing hill and ended up in the fence…

This is a nice entertaining interview from two class acts in Little Cottonwood Canyon

Read/listen to the full MP3 interview or digg this story.

I was chatting with my friend Brian today and we got to talkin’ about snow in the Wasatch, or a lack thereof as it stands now. I couldn’t help recall Thanksgiving of 2001 in LCC. Conditions were a lot like they are now. Grim. Then suddenly, instant powder. Enjoy…

Sunday, November 25, 2001

Sky Cover: Snowing Heavily

High Temp: 12 o

Winds: Moderate - NW

Expected Snowfall: 10-14 “

Today’s Report:

Skiers, this is what we all dream of and what makes Alta famous. What’s going on here right now only happens in Little Cottonwood Canyon. It was only last week that we were closed because we didn’t have enough snow. And now, we’re closed because we have too much snow. The storm we’re in right now is doing very good things to Alta. Once we have a chance to dig out a little bit, we’ll be able to come up with a solid opening time. At this point, we’re confident that our opening will be this week and we’ll make a specific announcement in this report and on alta.com tomorrow afternoon.

Since Thanksgiving, 82″ of snow has fallen on Alta. Today alone, the road has been closed, we’ve been interlodged all day and we’ve watched as 18″ of new snow has blanketed the area. And now, the National Weather Service is telling us that a lake effect band has set up and is pointed directly towards the Cottonwood Canyons.

Please be advised that at this time, the road into Little Cottonwood Canyon is temporarily closed for avalanche control work. UDOT tells us that the restriction is expected to last through the night. The town of Alta is also in Interlodge and is also expected to last through the night.

Right now in the town of Alta, it continues to snow hard, we have moderate winds out of the NW and about 20 degrees. In the last 24hrs., we’ve received 31″ bringing our total since October 1st to 111″. Settled snow depth at mid-mountain now stands at 76″.

Our forecast for the next few days looks pretty impressive. As the lake effect kicks in, we could see as much as 10-14″ tonight and another 7-10″ or more tomorrow. With the snow, we should see wind speeds in the moderate range with a low temperature tonight around 10 and high tomorrow near 15. The forecast for Tuesday through Saturday calls for cloudy skies with a chance for snow each day.

The above is a snow report I saved from Alta.com, Thanksgiving week 2001.

Thursday, November 15th was the scheduled opening day 2007 at Alta…but it ain’t happenin. October came in strong and hard (in fact I skied Gunsight to lower Greely Oct 21st, my Mother’s Birthday…and it was deep and fluffy), but we’ve been shut out practically this month so far. It’s how it goes in the Wasatch. But at anytime we can have 100 inches in 100 hours once again.

Discussion on AltaCam about opening day: Alta not Opening on Nov.15

Here’s the note on the Alta.com homepage:

“Our optimism for a November 15th opening hasn’t been supported by Mother Nature. Our first storm in 2 weeks gave us 5 inches of snow and cooler temperatures so we can now make snow at night. Pray for another storm or two. We’ll open as soon as conditions allow. Keep checking alta.com for updates.”

Here we ago again. It’s the dawn of another ski season in Alta and AltaCam just released its first podcast of the 2007-08 ski season. Have at Johnny B’s sit down interview with ski photographer Adam Clark. I’ve known Adam for a while and he’s a stand up guy and true professional. He couldn’t be denied at 21, when he started shooting skiers in Alta professionally. Now he’s killing it, to wit:

I traveled to British Columbia, Washington, Alaska, this last winter. Winter is pretty much done here in Utah. Monday evening, I fly back to Alaska for a 35-day Denali Expedition. I’m going with Clark Fyans, Chris Davenport, and Nick DeVore. We’re just going up there to ski. Then after that, I go at the end of July to New Zealand, and then straight from New Zealand to Argentina, trying to finish up the Levitation Project’s ski and snowboard movie.

Not too shabby, eh?

It’s been over a decade now in the mountains of Utah and WAY beyond that Adam has dropped jaws by visually documenting mad expression throgh movement. He has the true Endless Winter traveling the world and skiing some of the most inspiring terrain anywhere. Thanks Adam for giving the subscribers of the AltaCam podcast series a glimpse into your passion for life.

Read the full MP3 interview or digg this story.