Deer Valley

First, there may be some confusion over the “box” features of the terrain park mentioned yesterday. A box is functionally similar to a rail, which is just a long rail of metal like the handrail of a staircase, which snowboarders can slide on from top to bottom and do tricks. Often it’s straight and flat, but sometimes it has an incline. The body’s direction of movement is always along the rail, but the skis or boards are often not pointed down the axis of movement. A box is like two of those metal rails with a smooth, flat, slippery material between them, probably some plastic. That gives a wider surface to slide on and does less damage to the skis, so it’s easier to slide on those, and they are becoming popular park features. I just skied along it with my skis straight, but some people do it with skis sideways, or rotate or jump while moving along it. Some people fall off if they lose balance. For a rail, you can’t ski straight across on skis because it’s not wide enough to support both skis. In the beginner park on High Meadow, I tried to slide down a box with my skis positioned diagonally. So much for park features. I always prefer natural ones.

This morning I shaved nicely, made a sandwich and took an apple for breakfast on the run. I did not get any work, though the children I had two days ago were still there. There was only one instructor on each level and they were all the “top dogs” - old experienced level 2 instructors. I suggested to some friends that we should head to Deer Valley. Tameca asked if anyone wanted to teach Cats but by then we were already out of uniform and about to go, and I don’t think I’d like teaching the four and five year olds. We let Bonnie take those kids. Matthew said he’d come to Deer Valley but he got sidetracked doing errands on the way, and I ended up going with just Dan, a very nice Jewish guy with a big bushy beard. We drove there there in his car, as he lives very near there. He’s been to Deer Valley many times before and was a good tour guide.

It’s a good thing their maps are printed on recycled paper and available at every lift line, because you can only open them once before they rip into shreds along the crease lines. I went through two of them in a few hours. Dan only skied with me until a little after noon, when we broke for lunch. He had to go home and write something for graduate school. I ate my sandwich and he had a venison and wild mushroom soup. The food there smells as excellent as everyone says it is; I’m almost sorry I didn’t have anything. Dan showed me around in the morning and then I skied alone for another three hours or so.

Deer Valley’s grooming is not very good, and most of their groomed trails are really bothersome hardpack. There were powerful winds too: On one side the snow was so bad I said it wouldn’t matter if they’d let snowboarders ride there, because there’s no snow left on the run for them to scrape off. Some of the groomed trails are steep though, so I was all right as long as I threw myself into a fast aggressive carve.

Because there are no boarders, expansive fields of moguls grow to an impressive size. I skied one with such deep trenches it reminded me of my instructor training. Skiers and boarders are part of a delicate ecosystem: we grow the moguls and they scrape them down. At Deer Valley there were many great mogul runs. The moguls don’t look so imposing from a distance or photographs, but just before noon the deepest of the trenches were fully shadowed. Dan said, “That mogul is so big it blots out the sun!” Some of those areas actually collected the windblown powder in deep pockets between the moguls, so they were more fun to ski than the bare groomed trails.

For a challenge, I tried steep and bumpy Daly Bowl, which had big hard moguls with no soft snow on them. They must get a lot of wind packing the snow, because it felt like solid hardpack and I was amazed to discover the base was over half the depth of my pole. I looked for tree runs where I could. At one point I found myself speeding through a forest where the thin trees suddenly got so dense I didn't think I could slip between them. I panicked and grabbed at some trunks to slow down, and eventually fell and got into an odd predicament where I hugged a tree as soon as I got up. It was pretty steep and slick so I just slid into the next one and wrapped myself around it, and eventually had to take off a ski to untangle myself. Only my jacket got a little dirty from bark but I really should start wearing a helmet for tree runs, just to be safe. Funnily, that happened just a couple of meters from the edge of the forest and the start of a groomed trail.

It was all still pretty fun and I enjoyed the variation from my mountain. They have better views so I took many pictures. I had to do several runs of trial and error to find my way back to the bottom, even using the shreds of my second map, because you need to take a short lift back.

I left my moon boots in an unlocked locker there so I wouldn‘t need to go back in ski boots. Instead of waiting for the bus I got on a hotel shuttle for the Best Western inn because it was almost empty and I reasoned it would bring me closer to home, and would make less stops and detours on the way. Then I remembered I’d have to carry all my ski gear so when it went up to the Canyons I hopped off and went back up to put my gear in the locker room, before catching the crowded bus home. Iain met me on the bus and loudly challenged what I was doing yesterday “skiing High Meadow on your day off with two kids?” He saw me going up the chairlift there with Riki and some random kid, and I guess he thought it would be fun to give me a hard time.