Do you ever get that awkward feeling when things seem out of place? For me, this feeling comes around every year – about mid August – and has been for the last 5 years or so. By the middle of fall, things begin to click back into place. The weather starts to get a bit cooler, the wind bites a little harder, and you know what’s right around the corner. You start paying more attention to the weather. What you used to loathe in the summer – dodging high-pressure systems and temps reaching into triple digits – has now become something that you are addicted to and will be for the next 6 months – tracking the big “L” on the Weather Channel.
Around late September the anticipation starts to build as the first flakes begin to fall above 8,000 feet, provided Old Man Winter is anxious to get things under way. The first low pressure systems begin building up off the Pacific coast. The jet stream shifts directions and these storms begin their journey inland. Landing first on the Cascades, Sierra Nevadas and crossing several other smaller ranges and open valleys, these storm fronts see parts of the country that have yet to be touched by human beings (one can hope); gaining and losing moisture along their journey. The storms continue racing across the arid landscapes of northern Nevada and western Utah, and finally reaching the Great Salt Lake where they are now infused with a different kind of energy – bearing this massive amount of moisture much like a cross on its shoulders. Traveling further east still, the storm reaches the Wasatch Front – and the beginning of its end.
Jutting out of the valley ground much like a wall of sky scrapers, the Wasatch Front is a formidable obstacle that stands in front of every storm, year after year, season after season; a constant. When the storms reach this stronghold, they have three options: if lucky, the storm crawls up Parleys Canyon along I-80, the easy way out. Options two and three are less favorable: much like their very own dead-ended labyrinths, the Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons sit pretty, waiting patiently before they get choked up with any storm that dare rivals them. As the fronts make their way up the canyons, the walls begin to close in on the storm, pinching it, strangling it, and finally, squeezing the life out of it. Naturally, the storm wants to continue east, but it can’t because it’s too heavy to breach the canyon rims and pour into the Park City Valley. It’s now that the fun begins.
The white room effect explodes, the flakes: HUGE. Blower begins to fall. Kids and kid-at-hearts in the valley see the dark mess stuck up the canyons, and all they can do is smile because they know that in a few weeks time their favorite lines will be filled in, hoping still that the lines they’ve been waiting seasons to ski will be filled in as well. The early season planks come out and backcountry poachers begin their dawn patrols; the first snow pits are dug, and the first sluffs begin to slide. It’s winter. It’s what so many of us live for, what we spend our summers dreaming of, what we wish we could be playing in when we’re at work, and what keeps us forever young.
