Today’s snow conditions were the toughest I’ve encountered at Snowbird. The groomed trails and some of the sheltered north-facing terrain were the only places where the conditions were reasonable. My original goals for today, however, didn’t include skiing groomed trails. I planned to explore new terrain, including Great Scott, Wilbere Bowl, and S.T.H. Today, it turned out, was not the right day for those endeavors.
I’ve improved my skiing this season, but tough snow conditions still give me trouble. They cause me to lose control and ski in survival mode, which is when I ski with poor technique in an unproductive attempt at staying in control. Fatigue, steep terrain, or difficult snow conditions have all occasionally caused me to ski in survival mode. Skiing with poor technique is tiring. That’s why you see exhausted beginners on the easiest bunny slopes. They’re exhausted because they’re using all their energy to fight gravity. They twist their upper bodies to get their turns started and then skid their skis to slow down. They’re skiing in survival mode.
Skiers turn to counter gravity’s desire to pull them down the mountain as fast as possible. Gravity, however, is a predictable force. Why fight it when you can use it to your advantage. Turning efficiently uses gravity to your advantage. If you anticipate the forces involved in skiing and make the adjustments necessary to maintain balance in their presence, then the speed, the intense pull of gravity on steep terrain, the centrifugal force generated by carved turns, and the weightless, floating sensations of skiing powder will be rewards rather than sources of fear.
Avoiding the fear that causes poor technique is easier said than done, but an assertive attitude is important, especially in difficult conditions. Skiing challenging terrain requires an acute awareness of the infinite variables that complicate your efforts to find flow and balance amid the static chaos of snow crystals stuck to a mountain.
To counter my tendency toward passivity and risk aversion, I use each day’s first run to awaken my skiing senses and ease any anxiousness that might’ve crept into my psyche. If I can’t get in the right mental state to tackle Snowbird’s challenges, my skiing suffers, and I’m often doomed for the day. Today was one of those days.
I cleared the fog from the tram window to get a look at Great Scott. The snow looked crusty and set up. I didn’t think it was a good idea to ski Great Scott for the first time in questionable conditions. I removed it from today’s to-do list. Instead, I settled for a warm-up run down Chip’s.
When I committed to the Cirque Traverse for my second run of the day, I didn’t anticipate that the conditions would be so treacherous. I removed Wilbere Bowl from my to-do list because the snow on the west side of the ridge felt more like cement than snow. This was the first time I considered skiing into Gad Valley from the Cirque Traverse, and I didn’t like what I found. The Gad Chutes area below me looked gnarly and complicated. I knew from looking up at that terrain from the GadZoom lift that cliff bands interrupted many lines down from the ridge. And from the ridge, I couldn’t find obvious routes that weren’t obscured by trees or by the convex shape of the terrain, which got steeper closer to the bottom. I felt I would need someone to show me how to avoid getting stuck atop a cliff or into some other trouble. Maybe my concerns were misplaced, but nothing I saw convinced me that I was ready for that terrain.
I skied farther down the Cirque Traverse than ever. It had been sunny and clear earlier, but now a thin layer of high-level clouds diffused the sunlight enough to create an eerie, gray pallor. I stopped at a southeast-facing spot directly across from Great Scott.
My meandering first run down Chip’s and my herky-jerky trek along the Cirque Traverse hadn’t prepared me mentally or physically for the challenge I encountered in the Lower Cirque. A breakable layer of crust covered the snow, and big, hard chunks of what was once dry, light Utah powder littered the slopes. Rob and Eric DesLauriers described skiing breakable crust as “no fun at all and potentially dangerous” in their book, Ski the Whole Mountain. Skiing among “frozen chicken heads,” they wrote, was “downright miserable for even the best skiers.” Beneath the crust, thick, cruddy snow manhandled my skis, and I abandoned the run soon after I started. I skied down and across the Cirque without making another turn into the fall line.
Given the snow conditions, I should have stuck to groomed trails, but I got bored with them and decided to ski S.T.H., a steep trail looker’s left of Gad 2 that’s separated from the lift line by a column of pine trees. The initials allegedly stand for Steeper Than Hell. From the top of Gad 2, I skied a few turns on Election down to an opening in the trees on the left side of the trail that marks S.T.H.’s entrance. The snow in this sheltered, north-facing area was better than in the Cirque but still difficult. The heavily trafficked main part of the trail was steep and bumpy. A wide-open area to the right offered fewer bumps and fresher snow, but lines there quickly disappeared into a grove of trees that hid cliffs. I stuck to the main part of the trail.
I skied a couple of messy, counterproductive turns—I flailed my arms, leaned into the hill, fell into the backseat, and prayed that my skis would turn—before I stopped again to gather myself. I tried skiing some turns again, but they quickly degraded into survival-mode turns. The snow conditions, the bumps, the steepness, and my lack of preparation conspired against me. I sideslipped down the rest of the trail. I felt defeated.
At the bottom, S.T.H. joins the runout from the Black Forest trail. Bumps and rolls studded the hardpacked runout. I absorbed the first few well, but then I hit one too hard. The force popped my left boot out of its binding and flung me, face-first, down to the pavement-like snow. My head began throbbing immediately after my face slammed against the ground. I popped right back up, shook off the cobwebs, and angrily slammed my boot back into my binding. I scolded myself as I skied cautiously down the remaining bumpy section of the runout. Nothing was going right. Either it was time for lunch, or it was time to leave.
I wasn’t wise enough to leave. I didn’t want to give up.
After lunch, I tried skiing the ungroomed crud in Little Cloud Bowl, but that was a terrible idea. I took two survival-mode turns, gave up, and made my way over to a groomed trail called Mark Malu Fork on the far west side of the bowl.
By this time, I was also skiing groomed runs as if my life were threatened. But I still didn’t give up. Why? Stubbornness, perhaps. I rode the Little Cloud lift again, but I headed north to the Cirque Traverse this time. I hoped that the afternoon warmth had softened the snow there.
It hadn’t. I made three survival-mode turns in the Lower Cirque and then bailed again by sideslipping and traversing down and across until I reached Chip’s Bypass. I then skied two more subpar groomer runs off the Peruvian lift, decided against taking one last tram run, and called it a day.
While I could have blamed the snow conditions for my terrible ski day, I mostly blamed myself. Plenty of good groomed snow was available. It was my fault for ignoring it all. I needed to ski more assertively in today’s snow conditions to ski the difficult terrain well. On S.T.H., for example, the conditions weren’t as treacherous as the breakable crust in the Cirque, but I didn’t have the assertive mindset I needed, so I skied it poorly. I hope today’s troubles were a fluke and not a recurrence of the problems that doomed me in February.
Note: This entry is an excerpt from my book A Skier’s Journal.