Words: Peter Kray 2018-12-10 15:05:27
My parents skied Snowbird just a few years after it opened in 1971. They told me about giant concrete hotels built like lush castles against the onslaught of avalanche, tram rides and “champagne powder.” They gave me a yellow T-shirt with the area’s iconic logo when they came home. I wore it to school so often my classmates signed it in the spring. From PSIA National Academies, ski introductions and an annual ski test, the Cliff Lodge, the grandest of those concrete castles floating in the sheer white waves of the Wasatch, has been my home for more than a cumulative year since then. I lost track of all the moments I spent watching through the windows in the shower for powder, and sipping hot miso soup all empty from another deep day in the Aerie on the top floor. One April, I lay in bed as lightning and thunder rocked the windows until it turned to snow. In the Mexican restaurant downstairs, my friend Max and I chain-drank tequila and Coronas, feeding dollars into the jukebox to hear every track of the Rolling Stones masterpiece Exile on Main Street. In the morning there was fresh powder and deep fog. Mineral Basin was closed except for the traverse around the mountain above Chip’s Run. The catwalk laid us out a couple times, but we dropped Double Down in spring conditions like ice cream on fresh corn. I kept telling myself to weight and steer each outside edge earlier in the turn. You learn the rhythm of the elevators packed with families on the weekend. Quiet during the week with three-day powder bachelor/bachelorettes getting their ski on. You see them getting coffee and green apples at reception in the morning, and stronger Wi-Fi, and in the afternoon buying 3.2-percent tallboys and cashews at the Cliff Sundries convenience store. There is the slow ride up Chickadee to the lockers at the end of each day, the couples in the hot tubs, and the kids in the pool. The windows in the showers are gone now, and the Aerie no longer serves miso soup. I’ve stayed in the Lodge and Iron Blosam a little farther down the road since then, discovering their own special secrets and charms. I’ve also visited in the summer a couple of times. Once, at an Arc’teryx footwear launch, a group I was in got pinned down below the top of the tram by a fast-moving storm. My friend Billy Brown was flat out in the tree well a few feet from my face as the lightning bolts rained down. A few months earlier, at a party in Park City, he had casually announced that he didn’t expect to live very long. I had joked to his wife that we should stay in touch, and as the storm rolled over us, he kept yelling, “I’m taking you with me, man!” On a press trip to South America, I had met a tall, beautiful skier named Frank Long. He was a charismatic East Coaster and former marine who made his home in Utah, where Snowbird became his mountain. For two weeks we skied across Chile, hugging sunshine and drinking wine. On the last day, in Valle Nevado, he hit a catwalk and fractured his spine. The injury took two years to kill him. I was standing on the balcony above the Cliff Lodge Atrium, looking up at the mountain’s blue and white beauty bursting through the windows when his son, Matt, called to tell me they were taking Frank off life support. As they held the phone to his ear, I watched another local arc his way down the high steeps of Silver Fox, and I said to Frank, “I can see you now. You’ve got a perfect line.” Photo Caption: The exterior of the Cliff Lodge with the tram in the background, Snowbird, UT, February 2018. Photo: Matt Crawley/Snowbird
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The Cliff Lodge
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