First powder skiing experience

Since getting back into Salt Lake City on Saturday night, I've done two days of alpine skiing and two days of nordic. The first day downhill skiing was up at Deer Valley in Park City on Sunday night. It was relatively straightforward skiing, although it was snowing really hard and was difficult to see at times, but in general, we basically got off the lift and skied down, nothing crazy. Park City was a pretty cool town.

Monday however, was a different story. We went up to a resort called Solitude in the "Big Cottonwood" Canyon. They had gotten about 20 inches of new snow the previous night, so this turned into my first experience "powder skiing". We took three lifts to the top of Solitude and got off the lift and traversed across a ridge for about twenty minutes to the edge of the trail and then skied down through untouched knee-deep powder. It definitely took some getting used to, but Kevin and Jamie are both very experienced skiers and were able to coach me through the first few turns down a pretty steep pitch. We ended up doing three runs from top to bottom of this whole adventure. It was a lot of fun and quite a workout (both the traverse and the actual skiing). I'm pretty sure I used some muscles skiing through that stuff that had never been used before. Below are some pictures I snapped from the day.

This was the end of the traverse where we started skiing down.

Here's a shot of a couple skiers making their way towards us on the traverse.
Kevin (in red) and his uncle taking a little breather on the way out. It was pretty steep, not sure if these pictures really do it justice.
Kevin and Jamie getting ready to ski down through the chute to the right in between the trees. These apline skiers have all kinds of lingo for getting after it on a powder day, not sure if I understood half of what they said during the day. Kevin did give me some good advice though - "just always remember - if you fall, it's really soft everywhere. If you lose a ski though, you might be up here a while trying to find it and get it back on." I did fall a couple times, but managed to keep all my equipment attached to me, so I didn't have any of those issues.
Here's a shot from the end of the traverse. I took this right before I headed down. Not going to lie, I was a little nervous, it looked wicked steep.
Jamie and Kevin again.
Nice view out in the Honeycomb Canyon.

Here's a shot up the hill after I skied partway down.

Overall, it was a really fun day, and at the end of it, I was totally fried. It did give me a new appreciation for why people become ski bums though, I get it, skiing through this stuff is a lot of fun!

I took some really good pictures from nordic skiing days at Alta yesterday and Soldier Hollow today. I'll post those in a separate post.