GET CONNECTED
Despite less than ideal conditions Alf Alderson finds the Utah Interconnect is still a great ski adventure
“’Highway to Heaven’? More like bloody ‘Highway to Hell’” gasped James as he sucked in the dry mountain air. We were on a long traverse some 10,000 feet up in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, enjoying (or maybe enduring) the most testing part of the ‘Utah Interconnect’.
Despite the fact that it sounds like an urban transport system the ‘Interconnect’ is actually one of North America’s great days out on skis, a 27-mile long guided adventure that uses a combination of ski lifts and easy backcountry skiing to take you between the best resorts in Utah.
Open to any decent intermediate skier, over the course of some six hours you take in Deer Valley, Park City, Solitude, Brighton, Alta and Snowbird, providing everything from the glitzy (Deer Valley and Park City) to the hard core (all the rest), at the end of which you’re whisked back to the start point in a minibus.
These iconic US resorts are not linked by ski lifts, hence our strenuous traverse on the ‘Highway to Heaven’; if they were they’d easily make up the largest linked ski area in North America. It would require little more than a couple of lifts to create this giant powder paradise, but there’s ferocious opposition to the idea from the large local contingent of beardy backcountry skiers and boarders who are keen to keep ‘their’ mountains unsullied by machines and metalwork, so for now you have no choice but to earn your turns on the Interconnect if you want to sample Utah’s finest in the space of a day.
The payoff for slogging your way along traverses such as the Highway to Heaven comes in fun stuff like the descent to Alta which follows, taking in a mix of widely spaced trees and alpine meadows. Most skiers get to do this in the famous Wasatch Mountain powder, marketed and trademarked somewhat bombastically as ‘The Greatest Snow on Earth’ – unfortunately for me the greatest snow on Earth seemed to be in the Alps when I visited last February, although needless to say it dumped the day I left Utah. And despite the dearth of powder our guides Calvin and Bob still managed to find pockets of white gold here and there throughout the day.
Greeting our mixed group of Brit, Texan, Canadian and Swedish skiers at the start point in a swish Deer Valley base lodge, Bob informed the nine of us that we’d need no special ski touring gear to complete the Interconnect and we should look upon it as a chance to ski Utah’s best ski resorts as much as a backcountry adventure.
A reassuringly laid back General Custer lookalike, Bob also advised: “Tone down your skiing when you get into the backcountry – there are lots of natural hazards at the moment as we only have a fifty inch snowpack, which is half of normal for this time of year; so watch out for one another”.
Cue anxious looks all round. But at least the lack of snow meant the avalanche risk was low, and things start easily enough with a couple of whoop-it-up runs on the freshly groomed ‘corduroy’ beneath Deer Valley’s Sterling Express lift.
We then duck under the boundary ropes for a short hike, skis on shoulders, into the neighbouring Park City ski area, where we hit some more ‘groomers’ before heading into relatively wild terrain where some very mixed backcountry skiing is on offer. Trees, open meadows, one or two steep pitches and a long, flat run out take us into Big Cottonwood Canyon and the resort of Solitude.
This section is where good ski technique really helps, since the snow varies from talc-smooth powder to hard crust. When we’re all gathered at the bottom of the steepest and most arboreal pitch, Bob impart some useful advice – “Keep your hands out in front of you – it’ll help you keep your balance in mixed snow conditions like these”.
“Shame you didn’t tell us that earlier!” comes back Swedish skier Jonas with a smile on his snow-plastered face.
Solitude turns out to be aptly named – where is everybody? Compared to the Alps all of Utah’s resorts are quiet, but Solitude is so empty one wonders how they can afford to run the lifts. Still, no one is complaining as it means we get to blast down wide, empty pistes at full bore as the last of the sunlight fades away behind milky skies and light snow starts to fall.
From here it’s an easy hop into Brighton, which is actually linked to Solitude, for a little more piste skiing before we have to retrace our ski tracks and return to Solitude. This is for the eminently sensible reason that our onward journey to Little Cottonwood Canyon and the final two Interconnect resorts of Alta and Snowbird can only be completed from Brighton by lots of hiking. From Solitude it’s easy – you just have to do the Highway to Heaven…
Which to be honest is not that bad – a twenty-minute traverse fuelled by the obligatory massive lunch at Last Chance Mining Camp Grill in Solitude (like many Rocky Mountain ski resorts Solitude was originally a mining settlement) isn’t asking that much in return for the wild scenery and (usually) powder that you get, not to mention the highlights of the trip as far as most of us were concerned – Alta and Snowbird.
The two resorts are linked by ski lift so it’s easy getting from one to the other, and I’d skied both of them a couple of days before in brilliant sunshine, when they provided some of the best skiing I had all winter despite the lack of the elusive ‘Greatest Snow on Earth’. So back for a second bite at the cherry I already knew that we were in for plenty of fun.
Lots of steep, very challenging off-piste terrain plastered in dry chalky snow, fast and furious groomers and a friendly, old school feel make it hard for any keen skier not to love these two quintessential Utah resorts. In fact Alta is so old school that snowboarding is still banned there.
As we stood on the summit of Snowbird’s 11,000-foot Hidden Peak ready for the last run of the day my fellow traveller Lewis said, almost as if to himself: “Imagine this in powder…”
Whether he was talking about our last run, Snowbird or the entire Interconnect I’m not sure, but having experienced all three in far from ideal conditions and still had a ball I knew exactly what he meant and could see that, like me, he was already talking himself into returning.
Alf Alderson travelled with Ski Safari (01273 224060; info@skisafari.com; www.skisafari.com) and stayed at The Black Bear Lodge in Deer Valley ( www.resortswest.com/rw/info/black-bear-lodge.aspx).
For information on holidays in Utah email info@goutah.co.uk or visit www.goutah.co.uk
