Day 7: La Montaña del Fuego
Because the opposite of snow is fire.
We flew for about an hour over what I’m convinced is the most desolate area in the US. The stretch between Denver and Salt Lake may contain some version of carbon-based life forms but the total blackness caused by a mixture of salt flats and salt lakes below begs to differ. But I’m a big believer that any flight that lands safely is a good one, and even better, on the end we got picked up by some great friends I haven’t seen in over a year.
The Mallat’s are a wonderful Lebanese family I got very close to back in high school when their son and I were both new transfers into our prep school. They were semi-escaping from yet another war, I was looking for a more challenging course load, you know, kind of the same thing. But as Semitic individuals with strong feelings about the Middle East, we always hit if off. They’re Utah based now, but spend much of their time between Paris and Lebanon, so it’s always a treat to catch them in the US. They’ve been amazingly hospitable for countless winter trips to Utah to enjoy the company and the mountains, and even though this visit was roughly 29 hours long, it’s always amazing to come out here.
The same can’t be said for the skiing. It’s been about 50 degrees even up in the mountains for a few days and whatever snow existed had apparently evaporated long before our arrival. Nathan and I checked the snow reports (or in this case, “snow” reports) last night, and seeing that Canyons—the mountain objective of the day—had about as much snow as sub-Saharan Africa, we decided to replace 90% of our skiing plans with sleeping in and watching Michigan take to Ohio State in The Game. Usually Nathan (a die-hard Wolverines fan) and I watch football AFTER skiing, but this whole trip is about trying new things, so we switched it up. Crazy, right?
We had to sadly leave the game at half-time to figure out a way to get to the mountain for the day as cars/transport was limited and ended up borrowing the youngest Mallat’s friend’s Toyota FJ to trek up to the mountain. For those of you who may not know what that is, just imagine a 1940's heavily armed German tank and add a spare tire to the back and you’ve got yourself an FJ.
Commander Friendly took the driving burden first, heading up to the mountains, and I’m only partially joking here because driving that thing was one of the trickiest parts of the whole trip. It’s basically a 4-wheeled blind spot that doesn’t like to stay in its lane and is equipped with a crazy powerful engine alongside brakes I can only imagine are made of soft cheese. But as always, we played the hand we were dealt, got right on the highway…and realized we were driving into the desert.
On the 30 mile trip to Canyons that used roughly 4 gallons of gas, we kept expecting to see snow start appearing, but the thermometer held steady at 48 degrees and the scene only got more and more arid.
And then we got there.
Pretty damn dry out. Probably one of the first times I’ve put boots on in a parking lot with neither snow nor that grim, gravelly mud that comes from snow melting. We didn’t even have that luxury. It was bone dry, cracked asphalt that hadn’t seen any form of moisture—liquid or solid—in far too long. So what did we do? We wen’t skiing!
It wasn’t exactly prime conditions, but what can you expect for such early season, so we wen’t and did what we do best—made our own fun.
But shirtless skiing even on the scorched earth we were visiting gets cold after a while, so we packed it in, headed home and had yet another fantastic meal prepared by the Mallats. It’s sad to say goodbye to such great friends and hospitality so soon. We left Denver 25 hours ago and in 5 hours we’ll be dog-legging a Southwest flight back through the Mile High City en route to Cali and some hopefully snowier mountains and more good friends out there.
Back to the road for another day,
Eric & Nathan
