Solitude

I finished up the field work looking in all the nooks and crannies for mold and water intrusion. I had the report pretty much wrapped up that evening. The site contact was a good guy, a native Utahn, hunter and outdoorsman. We hit it off pretty well, especially when I noticed the LED conversion on his Mini-Maglite. I must do the same with my own flashlight.

Wednesday I played a little hooky and headed up to Solitude for some skiing. I rented some Nordica Hot Rod all mountain skis and proceeded to tear it up. It was lightly snowing with some sun breaks. I stayed mostly on black groomed runs carving big fast GS turns. I did some exploring on the fringes and hit a few turns of untracked and windpacked – nice and deceivingly light snow. I did inadvertently run into some soft bump runs and managed to turn through them and managed some OK knees absorption. I couldn’t do that all day, especially with the altitude (gasp!). I saw some enticing double-blacks that required some traversing but I was by myself and the mountain was pretty uncrowded. It would have been nice to ski with someone who knows the mountain. But all in all it was a fantastic day of skiing. I realized just how much I love skiing and how I miss those 30-day seasons of my youth. I skied pretty well for an old fart.

I returned my gear to the shop, CanyonSports and grabbed a bite to eat before catching my plane home. I found a nice little place called Wriggles across from my hotel in Murray. They roll up a tortilla with a variety of meats and veggies and call it a Wriggles, a wrap by any other name. Like a homeless person, I had to change out of my ski clothes in my car.

I made it to the airport in plenty of time to put the finishing touches on my report. We took off from SLC and leveled off prematurely. The pilot came on and said a landing gear light was stuck on and that he’d lower and raise the gear and that would probably cure the stuck-on light. He did that and came back on and said the light was out. Very soon the engines revved up to take us to cruising altitude and home to Seattle.