Pedal or Powder in Utah?

By | April 18, 2007

One of the great things about living in central Utah is having the choice in the spring of either pedaling your bike, or skiing powder. Well some of the times it’s powder…

As you may or may not know during the spring in Utah if you aren’t getting the Pow while it’s snowing then you’re outta luck. As soon as the sun hits the snow this time of year it’s finished. With that said, though, one cannot discount the killer corn snow cycles that we enjoy. There’s nothing like hiking to the top of a nice ski shot early in the morning and then waiting for the perfect time for the snow to soften enough to dig into and carve all the way home. Corn is good, but we all know Powder is much MUCH better 🙂 SO, I’ll see what I can do about getting one last powder storm ride this season. Note: 12-18 expected in Little Cottonwood Canyon by tomorrow mornin’. Lifts are closed at Alta, but that don’t matter no how. That just means no crowds and plenty of powder for everyone everywhere. I like what daddyneedspow has to say at the AltaCam forum about lifts closing:

lifs? we don need no steenkin lifs.

some buddies and I hiked greeley for corn this morning and loved every second of it. tomorrow, we hike for pow!

Alta Post-Season: no screaming children, only screaming quads…

Full thread…

Now for early 2007 pedaling news: I’ve already got about 10 days on the AS-X namely pedaling the Glenwild area near Kimball Junction/Park City. It’s been a good start to my conditioning for the bike season. Been chasing around Kris Gray on his 29-inch single speed. My bike is around 38 lbs and I have been stubborn about staying in one, mid range gear on the climbs just for fun. Ha. Real fun. I have been pretty successful during the first 2/3 of the climb to the freeride trails but man it hurts. One thing that helps is that Gray pumps Bob Marley from external speakers on his hydration pack.


Map courtesy of UtahMountainBiking.com

Once we get to the freerides (this trail system has 3 sanctioned DH/freeride trails) we’ve been partial to ‘Ant Farm’. It’s the most recently built of the 3 DH/freeride trails. Not bad. One thing that is nice about these trails is that it takes around 4 miles of uphill and traverse pedaling to get there.. so this keeps all the strict DHers on 50lb. bikes from flooding the zone. Not that I have anything at all against DHers.. but I like the idea of working a little to get to these progressive trails. Seems they are getting better each year. I hope Mountain Trails keeps it up in that regard. Build more freerides! And make each new one more and more challenging. The next thing you know we’ll have something like A Line at Whistler at our fingertips!

Over and Out, Gary M

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