Day 13 - Tuesday Jan 1 - And a Voile New Year

I went up skiing today with some of my coworkers at Voile. The original idea was that we were going to be joined by the Wizard of the Wasatch; but for whatever reason, he did not make it. I met Don at the mouth of Big Cottonwood at 8:30 and we then met Mark, his wife G, and two of their friends up at the upper Solitude parking lot. We then made our way back to West Monitor. Even at the beginning of the day it was hard to try to keep up with Mark (he is an ultra marathoner), but as the day progressed it became harder and harder. We arrived to find West Monitor completely untouched. We approached it with caution by kicking a few cornices and trying to set something off... nothing went. We then decided we should go for it. Mark took the first turns and then I followed. As you can see in the photos, West Monitor is a huge bowl with a ton of room to make a lot of turns before you reach the bottom. The snow was, once again, fantastic and the turns were nice and big to be sure I didn't sink. We decided it was too good to not make another lap in this same area so we did. This was equally as good (see the video of Don on his splitboard hauling down with huge waves of snow from his turns). We then went up to the next drainage to the west called McDonalds. If we had kept skiing down this we would have ended up at the Canyon's resort. This was not as long as West Monitor, but the turns were just as good. We took two laps in here before deciding to begin our descent back to the car. This also brought some sweet turns down Will's Hill and then a long traverse back to the uptrack. This was a killer day and I had a great time skiing with these folks. I look forward to doing it again.