written by: Matthew D. LaPlante
Beaver Mountain
At the mouth of Logan Canyon, we were stopped by a state trooper. “We’re about to close the road,” he said. “There’s already been a slide and more snow is on the way. If you’re planning on coming back in the next two days, I’d just not leave.”
We forged ahead. The slide was no joke — it had covered more than half the road, but we squeezed by on the other side, and pulled into the Beaver Mountain parking lot next to only two cars.
Travis Seeholzer, Beaver Mountain’s operations manager, led us under Harry’s Dream—the lift named after his grandfather and resort founder Harold Seeholzer. We floated over pillows the size of VW Beetles. We hopped back on Harry’s and this time traversed skiers right past the resort boundary, twisting through aspen groves and dropping into untouched powder run after untouched powder run. Up Harry’s again. This time we veered hard left, heading down a roller coaster run through spindly evergreens and waist-deep clearings.
And the mountain just kept reloading. There wasn’t a visible track on the entire resort, and we were practically alone to do with it whatever we pleased.
Cherry Peak Resort
The canyon may have been closed to incoming traffic, but nobody was there to stop us from leaving. An hour after departing Beaver, we were pulling into Cherry Peak.
Schools across Cache County declared a snow day, and it seemed that every kid was at the state’s newest ski resort. It was like Lord of the Flies, but on a snow-covered mountain with plenty of wide-open runs, tree-lined gullies and charmingly traversable scrub oak patches.
Two days and two feet of snow into our trip, something was already very clear.
“We’re not even a third of the way into this,” Swede said in the hotel hot tub that evening, “and if we stopped right now, I’d still be able to say this is one of the best ski trips of my life.”
Read about each day here: The Challenge | Day One | Day Two | Day Three | Day Four | Day Five | Day Six | Day Seven
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See more inside our 2018 Jan/Feb Issue.
