Ski Bum Poet

Sorry. Not that anyone is really waiting for the apology, but I guess it just feels good to say it. So sorry again. I gave an honest go at trying to keep SBP updated on our adventure details from back east, but it just didn’t happen . (Danette did a great job documenting the trip on Peas & Love, though) My effort stalled at Ellie’s First Road Trip, Episode 1 and Trip Episodes 2, 3 and 4 (and more) to come! …HA! That’s a laugh. But I really was sincere at the time I was writing those about posting more rants while back east.

I must say the trip was a little stressful, what with the winter cross country trip, then back. But at the same time it was important. I REALLY wanted Mom and everyone to bond with Ellie.

To shift gears a bit (this is trule Daily Grind), part of what made me want to post tonight is to show off our Alta wedding web site I put together before our day on Sept 20, 2003. Funny reading through that again. I had a lot of energy. And I was so excited to share the wonders of Little Cottonwood with people who had never seen it.

Funny, too…when I went to link up the wedding site from Danette’s lastest blog post on Peas about our first weekend at Alta this year, I discovered a non-functional and bloated post board file. It had been overtaken with comment spam. The HTML file was 16M! Anyways I cleaned it up, disabled the form and now she’s back online (touching comments we’ll always want to save there!). Lotsa good Google food there as well ;).

I especially love the map to Alta Danette hand drew for our guest. Check it out:

Just another killer MP3 in the AltaCam Podcast series for the 2007-08 ski season. AltaCam is releasing these interviews every two weeks all season, and then the out takes during the summer months o 2008! JB is fine tuning his interview skills with each new release. From old time legends to the most popular skiers in the industry right now, Johnny knows how to get the info you want to hear/read!

From the digg submission: “Another AltaCam exclusive MP3 interview and transcript. This time Johnny B interviews Sage at his home at the base of Little Cottonwood Canyon in the Wasatch mountains of Utah. Read about Sage’s journey from Alta, Wyoming to the Alta Peruvian Lodge dish pit in Alta, Utah to international ski fame!”

Here’s a quote from the directly from the interview transcript itself:

Sage: Well I grew up at Targhee. I was on the ski team right away. I went to school and our school had a program that brought us skiing once a week. And so that was the original.

When I first started going out on skis, my mom took me out and the school is taking me out. And then I was on the ski team by 5th grade or so. And so the coach at the ski team really taught me the fundamentals of skiing. But Targhee wasn’t a really good race hill because we get so much pow similar to Alta, Utah and Alta, Wyoming. It’s same thing. Gets dumped on a lot.

After a while, after learning the fundamentals of skiing, it was really fun to get racing. It was like am I really going to slip this four inches of powder off the soft groomer so that I can race gaits or am I going to go ski around. My favorite memory is just once I started. I had that knowledge of ski fundamentals. And then it was just cruising around, skiing powder, jumping off stuff. And there was lots of good stuff to jump off at Targhee.

Read/listen to the full MP3 interview or digg this story. There is also a thread started on this interview in the Alta Ski Forum: Sage Cattabriga-Alosa Interview & Podcast.

The 3rd in many this winter, this AltaCam exclusive is one you should definitely check out. Talk about some inspirational stories and classic times! Johnny B does a great job talkin’ life and powder skiing in Little Cottonwood Canyon with Alan Engen. Can you imagine charging untracked powder all day in the 50s and 60s when you were 16 years old? If that’s not enough to imagine, now think about following around Alf, Sverre and Corey Engen all day. Like I said, a classic interview that will go down in the legends of archived Alta Skiing web content.

Here’s a snippet from the interview transcript…

Alan Engen: You can see when the three of them would go out and ski powder, Sverre and Alf were always…they were skiing fools in the powder. Corey was struggling a little bit until it got all hard-packed and then Corey was just phenomenal in what he could do too. He was an Olympian and everything else.

Read/listen to the full MP3 interview or digg this story. There is also a thread started on this interview in the Alta Ski Forum: Alan Engen Interview & Podcast

A timeless photos from the Alan Engen Ski History Collection (Photo of Alf & Alan Engen making a double jump in front of the Alta Lodge. Photo circa January, 1949. Alan was 8 years old at the time)

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.

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.

Last Sunday (two days ago) I went up to Little Cottonwood Canyon and had a great time skiing it up with good friends and all the energetic locals that make up the traditional last day festivities at Alta Ski Area. Of course Snowbird in LCC is still open, and they will be for several more weeks.. but the season is pretty much over for me/us. Notice I said ‘pretty much’ I am certainly not afraid to hike for good corn or even pay for a day of skiing at the ‘Turd if there’s exceptional April/May powder.

In recent years Alta Ski Lift Co. Management has split up the closing day for skiing into two weekends, which I think is probably a good idea. One driving factor for ‘two closing weekends’ is likely to mitigate the impact and potential hazards of too much drinking and trippin’ on High Boy. The last day antics and raging have gotten pretty intense and the party keeps getting bigger and bigger. It can’t help but keep growing when Powder Mag and other major skiing media write stories about classic High Boy Parties. I missed the first High Rustler party of the 2007 year (last weekend - Apr 15th), but on the second last day party (Apr 22nd) I noticed Onno Wieringa himself (the GM of Alta) checking tickets at the end of the day. Again, a good idea and IMO it’s very refreshing to see the actual general manager there rolling up his sleeves and checking tickets. (It has been widely known that anyone can get on the chair lift from 3pm on during the last day - no more and I applaud that!)

So how about the skiing you’re wondering? Well, um…not too much to report there. Although I did have fun on some high speed groomers and even 3 High Boys in a row top-to-bottom to end the season. The last of the three was my favorite. I was solo all the way out on the High T, and all the way down High Boy..non-stop..thinking the whole time about our little baby growing in Danette’s belly. What great thoughts and surely a last run of the year to remember. Next ski season, we’ll have our baby to take turns watching in the Goldminer’s Cafe while we switch up our ski time. I like the sounds of that.

This was a different ski season for me because we moved to the Wasatch back east of Heber City in April of last year. That made the commute over an hour each way to Alta so I was there 1-3 days a week instead of 4-6. What that did was help me appreciate skiing and life in LCC all that much more. No matter how crappy the snowpak was (just barely broke 400 inches - first time of 8 I’ve been here that we haven’t hit that magic 500 inch mark - see the Alta Snowfall History) I always focused on appreciating being there and making the best of every turn. I am proud to report that I am still a full-blooded Altafarian paying the price everyday! Alta…til next season old friend. Thanks for the 2006-07 memories

One last thing…check this out. This is the Photo of the Day on Alta.com for the last day of the 2006-2007 ski season. I am 99% sure based on the skier form and Rossi skis that it’s Sam Howard skiing off into the sunset of another amazing experience. Thanks all for another great ski year!