DENVER, BEN’S WIFE, DROPS IN FIRST. It’s a short shot, maybe 500 vertical feet, but it has a decent pitch through the trees. She makes short, clean turns through fantastic snow, getting the most out of the soft, settled powder before we transition and skin to our next run. The Tom Brady storm continues to deliver. It’s the morning after the state of the snowpack discussion. Denver has joined Ben, Kory and I for a tour somewhere on the Ben Lomond massif. I won’t say exactly where, but can divulge that we skinned for about an hour before getting to this line, and we will walk a lot more before we finish skiing and take our approach track out to the parking lot. Unlike many backcountry zones in the Central Wasatch, there is very little easy access on Ben Lomond. To ski here, you have to trudge. Locals call it the entry fee. It’s often worth it, though, especially in these sheltered zones lower on the mountain. Jim Steenberg, author of the book Secrets of the Greatest Snow on Earth , calls Ben Lomond, “pound for pound the snowiest place in Utah,” which he qualifies by adding that Snowbird gets more snow, but the data is gathered at 9,650 feet (roughly Ben Lomond’s sum-mit). Ben Lomond gets just slightly less, but at 8,000 feet. In terms of skiing quality, Steenberg has even more cave-ats. “The storms at Ben Lomond are typically monsters that occur during southwesterly flow. This gives a big snowpack, but often creates high avalanche hazard and is not optimal for a high frequency of powder days,” he writes on his Wasatch Weather Weenies blog. “I’ve skied on Ben Lomond many times and it is an extremely windy place on the ridge and above timberline. Finding good powder in the alpine requires good fortune.” The big takeaway is though it has similar snowfall in relative proximity to the Cottonwoods, forecasting on Ben Lomond is an entirely different animal. And that’s just one zone. Unlike the Salt Lake City mountains, the Ogden area mountains aren’t so much a range as a series of disconnected massifs, each with unique elevations, snow conditions and weather patterns. In short, the Ogden area is a complicated place to forecast. “Even Snowbasin to Powder Mountain to Ben Lomond in the Ogden area are wildly different,” Bauter says. It’s an issue Ogden’s tight-knit backcountry community handled in the past by sharing information privately. “You’d send out a text to all your different friends that you knew had skied that day,” Bauter says. “We were all just talking to each other anyway. And then Kory and Mike Henderson, who was working for the Weber State outdoor program, talked about it one day, and started the Instagram.” Ogden Avalanche has helped galvanize Ogden’s backcoun-try community. The old guard and those new to the region now have a way to share information. And that was always the goal, according to Davis and Bauter—not to replace the UAC forecast, but to provide the community with more re-sources, to keep them safer. For the past two seasons, Ogden Avalanche has hosted the “Backcountry Bash,” a party that has raised close to $15,000 for the UAC. A large portion of that will still go to the UAC, even as Ogden Avalanche works to support itself. “Being a part of the community I think is the biggest part,” Davis says. “Being a part of the ski patrol community at Snowbasin, the ski patrol community at Powder Mountain, the guide community at Whisper Ridge, and being a part of the North Fork community. And then the climbers, the snow-mobilers at Monte Cristo… It’s a community, and Ogden’s always had that communal feel to me. I always liked that about Ogden. That is more important than the minute accuracy deficiencies with the forecasting through the UAC. People in Ogden want things from Ogden.” 058 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 13, Issue 2: Page 58
