Utah has gotten wallopped with its first big snowstorm around this week each of the six autumns I’ve lived here.  This week it began snowing in the mountains on a Monday night and after seeing facebook pictures of trail breaking in deep powder Noah Howell, Ben Peters, John and I decided to check it out.  With most of the NWS’s remote snow-sensing stations still decomissioned from summer we hoped that we’d find as much snow in Little Cottonwood Canyon as we’d heard had fallen in the mountains outside of Ogden.

Rolling past Snowbird Resort we were dismayed to see hillsides more brown that white. Stubbornly, we skinned Greely Bowl and lapped some very low angle meadows.  It was awkward skiing in vegetation that grabbed at our skis.