For the Alta views of course!

Today was a bluebird day at Alta and I grabbed some nice photos.  I always ski with my little P&S camera in my pocket just in case, and today was a great day to have it.

First up, a three frame composite panorama.  I whipped this together really quickly, but in all I think it came out decent.  Still needs a little tweaking.  There is just such sheer beauty up at Alta, sometimes you just have to stop and enjoy the amazing view!

Alta Panorama from #9 Express

The Second photo is from the top of Supreme looking down into Heber Valley.  Up here we are above the inversion which keeps the clouds down in the valley.  It is kinda pretty.  Makes you wish that you could go cloud surfing or something.

Heber Valley Clouds

I would have published this yesterday, but I was too darn tired to finish it and all that jazz.

So, yesterday I made my way up to Deer Valley to ski with my uncle. When I got up to park city I had driven into possibly the biggest snow storm we have had this season. Couple that with the fact that the Sundance Film Festival is in town and you get tons of traffic and amazingly lousy drivers. The mine road up to Sliver Lake Village was closed and driving up Royal Street was a little treacherous. I made it up fine, but there were plenty of people having issues. Hey, this is Utah, we get lots of snow, people should know how to drive in it, but that is neither here nor there.

My uncle had set up a ski demo for the day for me so I picked up my boots and caught a shuttle over to the ski shop to pick up a pair of Volkl Mantras. We had been in the shop the day before getting bindings for Natalie’s new skis, and we got to talking about skis with one of the guys from the shop and we figured that it would be worth trying them out.

The Mantra is one of Volkl’s freeride skis and it is a pretty wide beast compared to my Salomon X-Wing Tornados. With a 133-96-116 profile, these are probably the widest skis I have ever skied save for the Evolution Powder Boards that my uncle has. My ’07 Tornados are a 124-75-107. So it took a little getting used to, but after a couple runs I started to figure them out and I was having a great time.

Well, it seemed like I should ring in the new year on palindrome day (01022010) by starting up a new blog.  I don’t really know what that seemed like the thing to do, but it did.  Maybe it was just an excuse to finally buy my new domain, icewolf08.com.  I would really love to have icewolf.com, but it is taken already, and I have been using icewolf08 as a handle since the intertubes were new.  I suppose the other thing is that it gives me something to do (though I don’t really need it) during tech for the show.

Speaking of tech, we seem to be moving right along for this one.  Working with Phil is always a blast, but I have to work quick because he likes to make all his changes at the last second.  We also have hit the end of our pre-written cues so we are moving a little bit slower now.  We teched through the entire first act in five hours and I think we should finish the show before the end of the night tonight, our first 10/12 tech.

Well, there may be only one run and the snow may not be that good, but it sure is fun to get back on the skis!