Its been a rather slow, yet interesting start to the 11'/12' winter. In terms of snow, Utah has had a few teaser storms that started up in early October, but there was never really any momentum with the storm patterns. Unfortunately, we're now setup with a very dangerous early season snowpack. There is a wide variety of weak layers from the ground up which will become a HUGE problem once the big storms finally arrive. It will be another year of extra caution and patience, allowing time for the mountains to heal up, and eventually we will find our place on the big lines. Lately its been great to hammer the groomers at the ski resorts, and this year I feel particularly nice about my condition going into the season.
^ Neil and I have found some good powder on the more mellow, grassy slopes. With the early season snowpack I'm usually more worried about tagging a rock or a log than an avi. You can avoid the avalanches by sticking to low angle slopes, but there's no way to avoid the sharks lurking beneath our severely deprived snowpack. With flashbacks of deep dry snow, heavy on my mind, I spent a night flipping through b-roll footage from our 2 month trip to BC last winter. I found some pow surfing footage and put together this GoPro helmet camera vid. For the record, I consider Retallack Lodge to be the holy mecca for pow surfing, or noboarding, whatever you wanna call it. Where else can you hit 6-10 runs a day, each one between 1500 and 4000 vertical feet of the nastiest fucking terrain in the world, without bindings?!?!?
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