My AT setup is sitting in Virginia.
I want to start there, because that fact is going to haunt me for the next five months and I need to process it somewhere, and here seems fine.
We drove up to Snowbird on Memorial Day weekend. This was not a ski trip — we were in Utah for other reasons, the resort was closed for the season, and I did not pack ski gear. I had made a reasonable assessment that May in Utah in a low-snow year did not require me to bring my touring setup.
That assessment was wrong.
The top half of Snowbird looked like it could be skied. Not looked-like-it-could-be-skied in the optimistic way where you’re squinting at a brown hillside and trying to convince yourself. I mean: the terrain above the tram was caked. White, loaded, continuous. Mineral Basin had seen some melt. Everything above it had not.
And then we watched people ski Pipeline.
They had skinned up from what had to be predawn. We were watching them come down in what may have been the best spring corn conditions I had seen all trip — the kind of surface that absorbs a ski perfectly, that forgives a little and rewards a lot, the kind that you only get when you time the freeze-thaw cycle right and you are willing to earn your turns by being out there before the lifts are even a consideration. They had done all of that. They skied it in front of us. It looked perfect.
Onlookers around me were noting that in a normal year, Memorial Day weekend would have been Snowbird’s closing weekend. In this low-snow year, the resort had already closed weeks earlier. But the mountain did not know that. The mountain had not read the operational calendar.
The tram ran its last day of the season that day — final run before the annual maintenance window closes it down until fall. We watched it move. We did not ride it.
The AT setup is in Virginia.
I will not make this mistake again. The rule going forward, permanently: any trip to Utah in late season or early spring — which means any trip to Utah from roughly March through June — travels with the AT setup. Full stop. No assessment, no optimization, no “probably won’t need it.” The cost of being wrong is too high. I know this now.
Here is the good news from the visit, and it is genuinely good: we bought Heather a Snowbird season pass.
Snowbird is now a home mountain. That changes the calculus for 26/27 in ways I am still working through. It means the Cottonwood corridor is a home zone. It means Snowbird is not a destination trip with trip planning and booking windows — it is a standing option. It means the 900-inch year that the Lucky Skis under the Wildcat lift at Alta may one day bring is a year we will be there for.
Five months until the season opens. The countdown is real and the return to snow at Snowbird is a known thing on the calendar now, not a maybe.
The AT setup will be packed.
