Returning from last season’s calf and knee injuries has been more difficult mentally than I anticipated. Most days I just don’t have it. I’m not even sure what it is, but I often find myself fearful on trails and terrain that have never posed a challenge in the past.
But I keep skiing. And I keep struggling.
I thought of different ways to challenge myself and to keep things interesting. I went to resorts I had never skied before (despite living nearby for over a decade), including Park City and Deer Valley. (I’m also planning to ski Solitude for the first time next week.)
This week, I decided to ski from every lift at Alta and Snowbird, which seemed like a fun gimmick to try. I have an Alta-Snowbird season pass; I figured I should take full advantage of it at least once.
I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to ski from every lift, so I wrote down a plan that would link my lift rides as seamlessly as possible, with no wasted motion. I almost forgot about the Albion lift at Alta, which I had never ridden before because Alta rarely runs it. I hoped it would be running today.
I excluded the surface tow and the two chairlifts servicing lodges at Alta. The surface tow connecting the Wildcat and Albion base areas isn’t really a lift, and it was easily avoided. And the lifts servicing the lodges are more for convenience than for bringing skiers to skiable terrain (both have a vertical rise of only 85 feet—less than the surface tow’s 108-foot rise when riding from Wildcat to Albion).
The weather was perfect: nice and sunny. The plan went off without any issues, and I was pleased that the Albion lift was running.
Besides Albion, the only other lift I had never ridden before was the Baby Thunder chairlift at Snowbird, which is a fixed-grip double chairlift at the western edge of the resort, below the Creekside base area.
Riding seventeen lifts across about 5,000 acres of skiable terrain yielded 14.5 miles of lift riding and 23.2 miles and 22,049 vertical feet of skiing. The maximum altitude was nearly 11,000 feet above sea level on Snowbird’s Hidden Peak, and the minimum elevation was about 7,700 feet at the base of Baby Thunder at Snowbird.
Here are the final GPS statistics (that 58-degree maximum slope angle is definitely an error):
