Day 15 - Thursday Jan 10 - Wow, that was fast

It has been snowing. The holidays are over. It was high time for a dawn patrol. I received great response to my inquiries yesterday for interested parties for skiing this morning. When Jer and I arrived at the Big Cottonwood parking lot at 5:10 I was expecting to see Cody, CJ, Evan, Matt, and perhaps some friends of Evan and CJ. After some waiting it ended up just being me, Jer, and the Codeman. I had not skied Circle All yet this year so we decided to do that. The "parking lot" at the Butler Fork trailhead required some shoveling on our part to be able to get the Jetta in, but we were surprised to see a couple other cars there already. It was while we were shoveling that we were approached by a dude saying his buddy hadn't shown up and he was looking for some ski partners for the morning. His name is Paul. We got the cars in and began to get ready when we noticed a sign from UDOT saying they were going to do some avy control work in the area in the next 24 hours. We decided we would be quick so we wouldn't run into any issues. We had a nice skin track to follow from those cars already at the trailhead. I really wanted to push myself this morning so I tried to skin as hard as I could. I made it about half way without having to slow down or stop. It was at this point that I began resting and then I was screwed. I still did alright for the rest of the skin up, but I do have a ways to go in the next couple months before the powderkeg (and before the half ironman this summer). We were on the peak even before there was enough light to ski so we hung out for just a couple of minutes until we could see enough to make some sweet turns. The skiing was great. The snow was soft. We were super fast in and super fast out. We were back to the car by like 7:20! We even had time to go to Molca Salsa for breakfast before heading off to class. Yeah, it was sweet. I was so excited for these photos because I thought they had just enough light to be way cool. Instead they are mostly just black. Oh, well. I hope you enjoy it all the same. These were taken from the peak before we skied down.