Powder Mountain, UT, Report: Just Stick to the Trees

Report from Sunday, February 26, 2023

We are living in a snow globe.

Last week the mountains got three feet of snow and today was the start of another multi-day storm that will again be bringing feet of snow to these mountains.

So naturally we chose to go to Powder Mountain for the first day of the tempest.

We made the hour and 15 minute drive from Sandy and got to Pow Mow around 11 am after it had just started dumping.

Perfect timing.

As we always do, we bulleted to Paradise.

It was warm, wet, snowy, but not windy and the visibility was iffy.

We took Snowchaser to Hidden Lake and then went and skied Powder Country to the highway.

Powder Country is such a vast terrain area with rolling terrain and lots of great tree skiing that it held all sorts of different snow conditions.

The gullies back there were a little skied and crusted while the tighter trees held cold, protected powder.

We then took the complimentary Powder Mountain Shuttle from the bottom of Powder Country over to Sundown, took it up, and got on the Lightning Ridge Snowcat.

We had the Lightning Ridge snowcat to ourselves. | Photo: SnowBrains

We were literally the only two people on the cat today and we had Lightning Ridge 100% to ourselves.

It was our lucky day.

When we were getting off the cat visibility had deteriorated greatly and the driver said to us,

“There’s only one rule today: stick to the trees!”

Traversing out onto Lightning Ridge into a bowl of milk, that’s exactly what we did.

We picked a nice-looking, untouched shot of powder dropping north into some sheltered trees and sent it.

It was soft, deep, perfect powder.

Cha-Ching.

There were hardly any tracks in this zone and we skied what felt like a backcountry powder lap through delightfully spaced evergreens.

I could hear my girlfriend howling through the trees in a stoked state, her excited yells echoing through the forest.

I was getting face shots in the untouched powder, flowing through the trees at speed.

We sailed smooth and easy all the way down to Paradise where we got on the chair right to go back and do the exact same thing, but this time on the Rain Tree snowcat, Powder Mountain’s other cat skiing area.

It was epic.

The the trees off the Cat was where it was at today.