NEWS:

By mid-March, our team was ready to wind down winter grooming operations in Round Valley.  After a few weeks of sunshine and near 60-degree temps, spring was in the air, mud-season had arrived, and the gravel and asphalt trails were edging out the snow-covered trails.  If you’ve lived here long enough, you know that springtime in the Wasatch is never a sure thing.  Ol’ Man Winter returned with multiple storms and several spring powder days to close out March.    

When a weather window opened last Wednesday, ‘Roy (the City’s grooming cat) took an Uber XXL up to Bonanza Flat where at 8,500 feet, the vault toilets are buried up to the rooflines and the snowmobiles are still buzzing like mosquitos.  We spent the day re-establishing the double-track connector and Nordic track, buried under nearly three months of winter since we exited the premises in early January. 

The journey began at Empire Pass where the old “Church of Dirt” is now the synagogue of snow.  As we tenuously traversed the steep, south-facing hillside above the Guard Road, more often than not, the location of said double-track was purely a guess, as our 10-foot-tall markers were either buried, broken or folded over by the wrath of a big Wasatch winter.  My trusty co-pilot, Alec, kept an eye open for markers or any recognizable terrain features that would keep us on the righteous path, or any path for that matter. 

Repeatedly moving forward and then backwards, we put ‘Roy’s blade to work, carving out a bench to keep us upright and on semi-level ground.  In some of the steeper areas there was a little pucker factor, as the underlying sun-cooked snowpack was rotten and would sometimes settle beneath our tracks.  In between the sun and flat light, we were able to catch brief glimpses of the two remaining markers and shadow on the hillside ahead, insinuating something well below the surface.

After nearly three hours of a somewhat arduous journey, we made the final ascent down to the “Y” at the Pine Canyon Road crossing and navigated around one last obstacle- a beat-up old Subaru wagon parked squarely in our path.  We both breathed a sigh of relief that the hardest part was behind us.  All that was left now was to track-pack and re-establish the remaining 10 kilometers of trail, leveling numerous drifts along the way.  Piece of ice cream cake!