ULX

Last weekend Christine and I went to Utah to become Mormon. We also did some skiing and went to the Utah Lindy Exchange.

The snow left something to be desired, but at least it was nice and sunny. Our host recommended skiing at Solitude because it's not crowded, and he sure wasn't kidding. When we arrived there couldn't have much more than 20 cars in the lot. They had several really wide runs that were groomed, so we had some fun on those for a while since the rest of the snow was pretty rough. One neat thing about this place was that instead of lift tickets they gave you RFID cards. You just put it in your jacket pocket and it gets magically scanned every time you get on a lift. A nice side benefit to this system is that they're able to sell you a card that's good for x number of lift rides. So you can buy a 10 lift card and use it over a couple afternoons instead of having to buy a full lift ticket each day.

The next day was spent at Snowbird. Again the snow wasn't anything to write home about, but the sunshine was very nice. In addition to all their lifts, snowbird has a tram that will take you from the bottom of the mountain to the very top in short order. Don't believe the hype. That could have easily been the most annoying skiing experience ever. Pretty much it's a train car on a cable, and the goal is to shove as many people as possible into it. Then add 10 more. Apparently the line is usually ferocious, and I can't imagine that anyone would actually wait a long time to ride up in this thing. I'd much rather take the alternate route up to the top by riding a few regular lifts.

While the weather at the resorts was bright and sunny, the weather in SLC was overcast and foggy. It was quite strange how you would be sitting in bright in the canyons, and then suddenly run into fog as you drive out. In the picture below you can see how the fog is just covering the city. Pretty neat actually.


Oh yeah, there was dancing too. Quite honestly, I was more interested in the skiing, but one of the swing factors making me decide to go was that George Gee was going to be there. I wasn't disappointed, because they played a pretty good set. It's funny, though, how may of the really good dancers were from Colorado. The whole exchange was like a good night at the Merc. Just another reason to love Colorado.

Aside from the stop at Little America for some ice cream, the trip back across Wyoming was not surprisingly lackluster. Here's Christine enjoying here $0.35 Little America cone.