Yesterday I headed up with a friend and my mom to Wolf Mountain in Eden, Utah to test out the beginner ground there. It had snowed 9" of East Coast snow, lending to pure cement by afternoon. It was beautiful anyway. It had been feeling a lot like Spring weather the past couple of days and I was wondering where our December weather was. As Rich (my friend from Florida) and I were skiing down one of our last runs of the day, I suddenly saw a flash of light and a second later heard that rumbling that generally follows a lightning bolt. Both of us being from Florida, we know that lightning is nothing to mess around with. Rich started racing down a black run (still learning how to get out of his snowplow) and I kinda stood in a stand-still stance in amazement. The storm had snuck up on everyone on the mountain and was now coming down on us in full force. Lightning struck again, this time, much closer and lit up the darkening sky. People on the lifts screamed and a second later we were being pelted with giant pea size pellets of hard snow (groppel). Never have I seen such a thing in Utah in December, and only once during the ski season at all, eight years earlier. I came to a realization with the screams that I'd better head down after Rich as well and get the heck outta Dodge. The pellets stung as they hit my face going mach-5 down the hill, but I just laughed incredulously. I have never experienced such a change in weather. It was such a powerful storm. The pellets filled every crevice in my car as we tried to rip our ski boots off. Within a matter of minutes, there was over two inches of pellets on the ground, and my windshield wipers could not keep up with it.
As we left we realized that we would need chains to get down the Ogden canyon. Having never put chains on my car before, I didn't realize that it would be such a process. I recruited a guy with a big truck for help. I think trucks and cowboy boots automatically qualify you as an expert in these areas. An hour later, with frozen hands and soaking boots, he had the darn things on and would accept none of our offers for compensation. Good ol' Utah people. We wished him a Merry Christmas and after filling the tires back up- they had to be almost entirely deflated- were on our way at 30 mph.
But we didn't get far. Just past the mouth of the Ogden canyon we saw flashing blue and red lights, followed by a short line of cars. Fourth in line, we were just far enough to not be able to see anything that was happening, but close enough to know we were lucky not to have been involved. We heard from curious people walking by that four cars had slid across the road, creating mass hysteria. No, ok, not that bad, but they were unable to get out of the predicament they were in and so we were told to wait for the snowplow that was on it's way, any minute now... 30 minutes now... 120 minutes now... Who knows how long it was after that. All I know is we started making up conversations for the people we could see who were going up to the police and talking to them, and making dumb noises whenever a car tried to turn around to go another way and ended up sliding off the road as well.
Driving back to SLC was pretty uneventful and once we got here the snow was just big fat flakes. Pure winter beauty. We headed into Federal Heights (an area right neighboring my neighborhood with historic homes) and did a Christmas light tour. It was really cozy looking there, perfectly Christmas in everyway. We decided to order a 26" pizza and play games in our little apartment afterwards, so the evening turned out pretty well (we had been planning on heading up to Park City and then to a tubing hill, but we figured we had enough of the elements for one day).
Today we woke up to a completely white world. The trees were heavily laden with snow and the streets were dangerously covered. But it was beatiful! I only wish today had been a ski day for me... over 2 feet of snow in 24 hours makes for some incredibly Utah skiing. Even if I had been able to go, however, the line from the ski resorts stretched for over 2 miles from the mouth of the canyon (so another 10-15 miles up the canyon from there in bumper-to-bumper traffic). Utahns know when to call in sick ;).
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