I picked up a road burrito at Alpha Coffee and headed up Little Cottonwood Canyon. Earth Day is coming Tuesday, April 22, but Alta Ski Area always gets into the action early. And what better a place to spend time with Mother Nature than in the mountains popularized by the legendary Alf Engen.
Nestled at the head of the canyon in the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, Alta exudes a vibe of authenticity in the sport, where skiers take their craft seriously and are in touch with their environmental surroundings.
It was 52 degrees in the Wildcat parking lot. The cars beside me rallied up grills and griddles, turning out a hearty birthday breakfast buffet. I enjoyed my early morning burrito.
As the sun crept up over Catherine’s Pass, Earth Day started to assemble with 10×10 booths below the Collins lift and a gleaming green PistenBully 600 E+ — one of Alta’s diesel-electric hybrid snowcats — standing guard at the skier service building.
Riding up Collins, I was entertained by a Dutch fellow. He and his buddies had flown to Salt Lake City for a final-week-of-the-season holiday at Alta. I saw him later — he could rip!
Dropping down onto the westward-facing Main Street, I was stunned at the firmness of the surface — every ripple of corduroy telegraphing vibrations from my Rossignol Black Ops Holyshreds up to my thighs with a ripsaw sound that went right through me.
On lift ride two, I gazed down at a dozen skiers with binoculars scanning the ridgeline. My first thought was that they were tracking some foolish skiers taking the High Traverse over to High Rustler to ski some early morning frozen-solid moguls. Alas, they were birding on skis, guided by experts from the Tracy Aviary, following birds around the mountain.
From the High Traverse to Baldy to Devil’s Castle and on to Catherine’s Pass, everywhere you turn at Alta, you are embraced by Mother Nature. We each have our emotional connection with the sport. But that feeling of togetherness with the wilderness manifests more at Alta than anywhere else.
Sliding off Sunnyside, I gathered with a group to do a little tree skiing. Today, we weren’t dropping into three feet of powder in Supreme Bowl. We were skiing to talk about trees!
Ian Piesner, a longtime arborist with Tree Utah, guided us as we slid down Patsey Marley to a stand of conifers. It’s easy to take trees for granted as we arc turns down the piste. Piesner, though, sees trees in a deeper way.
He introduced us to a stand of subalpine fir with a towering Engelmann spruce in the middle. “They’re pretty easy to tell apart,” he said, as we peered at the trees, trying to distinguish one from the other. He talked about the bark, the needles and the cones.
The spruce has a characteristic rough, scaly, orange bark, while the fir is more of a silvery gray. The spruce needles have four sides, coming together in a very prickly point. And if you see pine cones in the winter, it’s likely a spruce. Subalpine fir generally lose their cones.
As skiers and hikers, we look out over our Wasatch Range and imagine this is how it has always looked. Not so! Beginning in the 1850s, early settlers and later miners clear-cut most of the trees in what we now know as the Cottonwoods. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that some form of management started regrowing the forest. Today, the Alta Environmental Center oversees reforestation.
We did another lap on Sunnyside, congregating by a bizarre-looking tree atop a wind-swept knoll. This is where Piesner got excited. While the subalpine fir and Engelmann spruce stood tall and proud in the forest, we looked at a stand of trees that somewhat resembled the inflatable sky dancers outside a used car lot, their arms whipping around aimlessly.
That is the limber pine, or Pinus flexilis. As the name implies, its branches are limber, flopping endlessly in the wind. Their flexibility sheds heavy snowfall from its boughs and allows the tree to adjust to its habitat. They offer little value as timber and were generally exempt from the clear-cutting. So they tend to remain as the older trees on the mountain.
On the high ridgelines and craggy cliffs, Pinus flexilis is the star of the show at Alta. With some trees dating back 1,700 years, they are revered!
Riding up Supreme that afternoon, I stared at the trees as they whisked by, drawing on my newfound knowledge to spot the subalpine fir and Engelmann spruce quite handily. As the lift scaled the Supreme Cliffs, I looked off to the left to see the gnarly, aged trunks of massive limber pines clinging to the hillside majestically overseeing their kingdom.
I had gained a whole new respect for the world around me.