Crows Foot - Left Toe, March 2, 2021

When working from home and you have only an hour or two (sorry boss!) for lunch, and you 'need to ski damnit!' you take what you can get, you go ski the foothills. Real skiers dismiss low-elevation skiing as contrived and desperate, and maybe it is,  ski-quality snow is short lived and rocks abound just under the surface, but I’ve been surprised how good low-elevation skiing can be. That said, for depth and snow quality, you need to ski "low-elv” runs during or soon after a storm. It was almost a week since the last real storm so I was not expecting much, but the conditions exceeded expectations on all fronts. Powdery on the NW-N-NE aspects, and nary a rock. Plus, and perhaps most importantly for one who HATES crowds, the Crows Foot never gets skied. In decades of skiing Davis County, the only ski tracks I’ve seen  on the Crows Foot are mine. Yes, a brushy approach that often does not have full cover, it’s a study in skinning-booting-skinning-booting, but I’ve learned to enjoy grunge-skiing, if only to be alone. Today I was all alone. 

View SE over City Creek Canyon when topping Stonehenge Peak (6,654 ft), named for the dozens of rock towers that I destroy up there each summer. A modest rock cairn (three rocks, six inches high) is necessary at trail junctions, but a five-foot tall pile of rocks topped with an eight-foot PVC pipe flagpole with a flag is just a monument to a weak mind. God is the supreme creator, humans can never improve on divinity.    

At one the balds, I came across an explosion of feathers in the snow, presumably a Coyote feasting on a Grouse. 

Ripping to ski.

Powdery, albeit a bit wind-drifted at the top.

The skiing was awesome but getting a touch wet. If I had gone early this morning it would’ve been all cream, but in a new job I don’t have the flexibility to ditch for half a day.

Rollers! It’s tough to see in the photo, but this is steep! Approaching 40 degrees in the lower reaches. 

What goes down must go up. Too brushy to descend the drainage.

More rollers produced by my turns.

There are some big cliff-drops if that was my thing, one over 50 feet (not shown), but suicidal with a thin base.  

Skinner back up to go back down.

I can’t fake smile, it looks too fake.