All Alone in the World

STATS UPDATE:

As of Feb 1st.(Exactly 1 month into the trip):

Days Skiing: 24

Vertical Skied: Approx 485,000

Miles Skied: Approx 570 miles

Friday Feb. 1st was the first non ski day for me in a couple weeks. The morning was spent, cleaning and reorganizing my truck to live out of again. Around 11:00AM I dropped Brandon off at the Airport and was officially on my own for real this time. The problem was I had no real plan from this point forward.

My new plan was to use my truck for what I built it for. Camping in the most remote locations possible. So, I meandered my way south of SLC to 5 mile pass recreation area on Eagle Mountain. I was very successful in both testing my trucks capabilities as well as camping in an extremely remote location. I traveled approximately 12 miles up a mountain on a sketchy, rutted, snowy, and muddy trail to the top of an old mining area. I promise you the stock version of my truck or pretty much any other stock vehicle that was not a Jeep Wrangler would not have made it without incurring some sort of damage. But the trusty tacoma made it to a beautiful secluded site on a clear bluebird day.

While it was a blustery -10 F at home in Minnesota, I was sitting in my T-shirt in the back of my truck on a balmy 50 F sunny day taking in the fresh mountain air.

After enjoying a beautiful partly cloudy Saturday sunrise I headed off down the mountain toward SLC. I stopped for a much needed carwash and washed what i felt like was about 20lbs of a dried sandy mud concoction off literally every part of my truck. My afternoon was spent skiing Brighton again.

That evening I joined Masons friend Angela and some of her friends at the FIS world championships Ski Big Air. This was an awesome event as it made up for missing the Aspen Winter X-Games. Most of the same competitors were at this event including classic names like Alex Hall, Henrik Harlaut, and Nick Goepper.

Sunday I was back at Solitude for the Day. For the first time in over a week there was finally fresh snow on the slopes again! About 8 inches had fallen overnight and it was lightly snowing most of the day. After skiiing a few runs I stopped at the FIS World Championships Ski Cross Course to watch the boardcross team championships. It was awesome to see household name, Lindsey Jacobellis, help lead Team USA to victory. Unfortunately upper honeycomb was closed. Being stuck between timezones in my head I was late to the superbowl party at Angelas friends house. I'm not a fan of the Patriots or Rams anyway so I wasn't too worried. I also arrived to a score of 0-0 so nothing was missed.

Monday was yet another POW day. I met up with Jeff, an old friend from scouting spends his winters as a mountain tour guide at the Canyons side of Park City Mountain Resort. I tagged onto the back of one of his tours that had gotten a little too large to help keep the group together. I don't even work here and the group loved the tour so much tipped me at the end for helping out. My favorite area at PCMR was the Ninety-Nine 90 lift, which unsurprisingly services expert terrain at an altitude of 9990ft. That night Jeff and his wife took me to a little taco joint in Herber city called Tony's Tacos.

Extreme Blizzard White Out Conditions

Tuesday Jeff and I explored a new resort for both of us. Deer Valley is one of the few skier only resorts left in the country. About 1/3 of the mountain was closed the previous day due to wind. That was great for the conditions as that 1/3rd of the mountain had multiple days worth of fresh snow, adding up to about 24 inches, that had yet to be skied. To further improve the skiing, deer valley is not skied by many expert of piste skiers, especially when the conditions were on the verge of whiteout to get to this good terrain. This meant there were never lines and very few people skiing all the fresh snow. As far as snow conditions go, my day at Deer Valley was probably my favorite ski day of the trip thus far.