Utah has some of the best ski resorts in the country. So, why bother going anywhere else? Sometimes, curiosity beckons. That’s exactly what prompted us to head to Sun Valley in Ketchum, Idaho last March, a resort that is consistently rated as one of the best in North America. Although we originally expected a larger group to be traveling with us, homework assignments and motivation deficiencies resulted in our niece being our only companion. Less people didn’t equate to less enjoyment though. Allow me to catch you up on Ketchum.

Ketchum and Sun Valley Resort are situated in Wood River Valley, one of the oddest gorges I’ve ever entered. Its encircling mountains look mismatched with varying patches of foliage and incompatible gradients, fluctuating from thick evergreens to bare slopes at mild angles to gnarly ones. The sides of this valley just don’t seem like they belong together. To complete the uncanny impression, boulder-topped mounds bound up sharply at odd points in the middle of town. If you are interested in skiing somewhere scenic and idiosyncratic, this is your place.

From that peculiar dale rises Sun Valley Resort. Sun Valley is big, over 3,400 vertical feet and more than 2,400 acres. It felt big. Our first complete run, Warm Springs, took us nearly 45 minutes from lift to lift. We later learned that run is over two miles long.

What else did we discover about Sun Valley? All the difficulty designation for its trails were made in relation to each other, and they are all skewed. Greens at Sun Valley would be blues elsewhere and blues would be blacks. For instance, Warm Springs is one-third blue and two-thirds green. However, it certainly isn’t a beginner’s run. In general, I think beginners would find Sun Valley overwhelming, unless they stuck to Dollar Mountain. Dollar Mountain is the small beginner’s area that is completely separated from the resort’s main portion on Bald Mountain.

We also learned that most patrons of Sun Valley prefer groomed trails to fresh powder. Hence, powder lingers longer off the main paths there than at most resorts. Sun Valley hadn’t received any precipitation for a few days before our visit. Yet, we still found powder piled up on the sides of runs, and the trees were practically untouched. Those untracked trees were too tempting to Jason. Our first day, he took the group through a section of them he had gone down and enjoyed. When gaging the expertise needed for this particular hill, he had only considered its steepness and its density of vegetation separately, not as a combo, until he got us on it. He realized his oopsie somewhere amongst our downhill struggles. It’s okay, Jason; no one can think straight with powder on the brain. We made it through though, and he later admitted his chosen route was probably a double black diamond. Besides that unintended double-black-diamond dip, we stuck to Warm Springs that afternoon.

We rode for 3.67 hours from 12:45 to 4:25 and were rather spent by the end. That fatigue, in part, was due to our lack of lift-line breaks. It was a Thursday and there were basically no lift waits. The runs didn’t feel crowded either. If you visit Sun Valley during the week, expect to be welcomed by powder not people. Also, expect sunshine. Sun Valley is not a misnomer. That afternoon, there was not a cloud in the sky. With temperatures in the low 30s, it felt fantastic.

The next morning, Jason went out early for an hour and a half to hit some black diamonds before he got saddled with the rest of us. He did Mayday Bowl and Easter Bowl. He also did some tree runs and some smacking of his face with a branch, resulting in a bloody nose.

Once reunited, the group had lofty schemes to try all sorts of stuff from eating at the Seattle Ridge Lodge to going to College. While our plans didn’t turn out exactly as planned, we did take the route from Upper College through Sunset Strip and 42^nd Street to Lower River Run, which is green the whole way. The middle portion of this run was fun, but the rest was nothing special. The upper section was quite packed, the traverse too long, and the lower section almost flat. Perhaps repetition would have improved my opinion, but, as I was sick of trying to figure out maps and confront unfamiliar terrain, I requested we head back to Warm Springs. It was a good call. Warm Springs stayed my favorite run at Sun Valley as well as our niece’s.

Later, after some debating and indecisiveness, we decided not to go to Seattle Ridge for lunch. Instead, we got chips and drinks at the Lookout Lodge at the top of Bald Mountain, which could be the unusual offspring of a bunker and a saloon. Then, we headed down Ridge, Blue Grouse, and Middle River Run, a streak of blues. We rode from 12: 25 to 4:25, 3.67 hours again with our short break at Lookout Lodge considered. Temperatures got up to 33, and it was super bright and sunny. We tried taking our goggles off for a minute for a picture, and boy was it painful. If you visit Sun Valley, make sure you bring goggle lenses with a low VLT rating, or your eyes will be crabby!

Our final full day in Sun Valley, the group didn’t make it on the slopes until 1:15, but Jason went out in the morning by himself again for about 90 minutes. He checked out the Seattle Ridge area to see if we would like it. He thought the lodge was fancy and pleasant, but the traverse he took to access it (Gun Tower Lane) was way too long, boring, and busy. Despite his reconnaissance, we just ended up back on Warm Springs. I wanted to get a few pictures, but I didn’t want to get stuck with my camera for more than one run. Warm Springs was the only feasible route for that. For the record, taking pictures with a SLR on an abrupt hill while you are snowboarding is not ideal. It’s awkward to get the camera there and awkward to take it out… and really awkward if you lose it down the mountain. We went for three hours with only a 20-minute tinkle break. It was significantly more crowded than Thursday and Friday, but lift lines were still only a couple minutes long.

Sun Valley is indeed sunny, nearly blinding without goggles. It is also challenging, enormous, and enduringly powdery. The runs are long, but the lift lines are not. Would we go back? Yes, indeed.

Utah’s last winter was relentless with a constant barrage of storms. While the season’s grip on most of Utah was unyielding, we headed down to our favorite sunny section of the state, Moab. We don’t often visit Moab in February, but it’s not that hard to convince us to go anytime. We were joined by the families of a sister and later a brother. Here’s how our winter trip away from winter turned out.

Our first full day, we went on a Hell’s Revenge jeep adventure with Dan Mick’s Jeep Tours. Dan Mick is a legend in the jeeping community, and we were lucky enough to have the man himself as one of our drivers. His son Richard, a talented helmsman, was our other.

The Hell’s Revenge 4×4 Trail is 6.5 miles long and only recommended for experts, hence our hiring of drivers. My sister’s family hadn’t done any jeeping before, and they were surprised by the ruggedness of the “expert” terrain. Going up the Baby Lion’s Back, a thin sandstone fin and the first substantial obstacle encountered on the trail, our niece’s delight grew in proportion to her mom’s terror. That pattern remained constant our entire tour. We did Hell’s Gate, an optional side loop through a treacherous gully, and added extra obstacles including the Escalator and Mickey’s Hot Tub. The Escalator was the craziest of the three. It was also crazy to have a legend like Dan Mick driving us. And yes, Mickey’s Hot Tub was named after him because he was the first person nutty enough to drive in it.

The next day, we hiked in Arches National Park, a place my sister had never been despite all her years in Utah. Although temperatures were only in the high 40s, the sunshine made the outdoors quite pleasant with a jacket or two as we trekked 2.5 miles RT to Tower Arch. Tower Arch is always a favorite of ours due to its lack of popularity. We also checked out Double Arch along with the Windows and Turret Arch on the Windows Primitive Loop, which is 1.2 miles and definitely not less popular. We finished that hike in the dark, which freaked my brother out a bit. It’s a productive day when you make your brother a little nervous in pursuit of a completely harmless activity.

Along with cherished trails, we introduced the group to the Love Muffin Café and some of our other favorite Moab eateries.

On the way home, we stopped at the Athena Launch Complex near Green River, a place we promised a niece and nephew we would take them. We didn’t ruin anyone’s exploration with information about the purpose or identity of any of the fragmented remains at the compound. Instead, we let the group discover and brainstorm the functions of the lingering pieces before finally revealing all we had learned at and after our last visit. See my post on that last visit if you are curious about this intriguing defunct site.

Our short but unclouded outing to Moab let us temporarily ignore the ferocity of winter and introduce family to some of our beloved routes and restaurants. It was naturally delicious!

To rent a cabin near Solitude or Brighton Resorts in the peak of the downhill season, one must act in summer. That’s when we secured the Limber Pine Lodge for a little winter getaway with family in the later part of January last year. Reserving in summer requires faith that snow conditions will be adequate to justify all your efforts. Praying to the snow gods helps. On this occasion, our devotion was rewarded. The frost immortals blessed the slopes with more accumulation than hoped, and we gratefully accepted all they bestowed. You may recall that Utah’s last winter, 2023, was rather unbelievable. That’s the record-breaking snowbank from which this story emerges.

The Limber Pine Lodge is located near the Milly lift at Brighton. Although a perfect location, as mentioned, renting a cabin for a snowboarding trip in January in Utah is always a bit of a gamble, but we hit the jackpot this time! Brighton had already accumulated over 120 inches even though it was early in the season. There was so much snow covering the cabin that several of the windows had been boarded up for reinforcement. The roof was obscured under layers of white that resembled properly laminated pastry dough. Icicles wider and taller than me encased the structure like the deadly bars of a crystal prison. The front door opened to massive ice pillars and a pile of snow almost as tall as the door frame; it was not an entry or exit point any longer.

Eager for a flurry of interactions, snowboarding at Solitude was first on our outdoor agenda. It was delightful of course. Afterward, our niece joined us at the cabin a night earlier than the rest of the gang. Since I was just returning to activity following a break in my foot and dealing with a related knee injury, I decided to put on some shoes the next day rather than a board. While Jason went boarding with a friend at Brighton, our niece and I took to Solitude’s Nordic Center. We spent a couple hours completing 2.8 miles along the Cabin and Silver Lake Loops. I’m not sure how blizzards became the weather standard for us while snowshoeing, but that’s what we got again. With clearly marked trails, there was little opportunity to lose ourselves literally like we did at Soldier Hollow just weeks earlier (post pending), but we did lose ourselves figuratively in the churning flakes. Outside the pressed snowshoeing trails, our snowshoes sank over a foot into the mounting precipitation. In some spots, we could plunge our poles completely into the loose powder without impediment. Unreal!

We only saw a few other groups during our entire journey adding to the sensation of being adrift in a shifting, alabaster realm. Snowshoeing is slow and deliberate; the pace may have been too measured for our niece. There was no complaining, but she seemed eager to go back to the cabin and the wild sledding track and elaborate fort she had created with Jason. More family arrived that night.

Jason and I got out of bed at 6:40 the next morning to start boarding preparations as soon as we saw Brighton’s report of 12 inches overnight. The snow at Brighton was even more amazing than expected! Giddiness abounded. Two nephews and a niece all rode with us and progressed to Rachel’s Run, my custom path that is a mix of blue square and black diamond. Another nephew went off on his own for a large share of the day and progressed to who knows what.

We tried to go to dinner at Honeycomb Grill at Solitude that evening; my brother had made our large group a reservation. However, there was an accident down the canyon, and we barely made it into Brighton’s parking lot after being stuck in a traffic jam for over an hour. We resorted to eating at the Alpine Rose at Brighton. It wasn’t remarkable, but at least it was hot. Somehow, after that tiring day, we got enough ambition to play some games, and the next morning we dug our cars out of their waxen cocoons to start home.

Our Limber Pine Lodge outing proceeded much better than anticipated thanks to an unprecedented amount of snow that fell at precisely the ideal time. Praise be! The snow gods answered the powder prayers of this slope enthusiast!