Coester Family Ski Trip
Salt Lake City, Utah
December 1-8, 2000

Alta Sugar Bowl

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    Yvonne was visiting her mother in Sweden and I was getting a bit antsy.  And then the weather reports started reporting near record early snowfall in Utah.  I made a few phone calls and quickly set of a trip for the week after Yvonne returned home.  I had been to Salt Lake City the previous two years with my nephew Dan and my brother Jan and his kids, Sam and Lari so I was pretty familiar with the logistics.  I arranged to have the same house, the Maybird, just outside of Cottonwood Canyon and got onto the United Air Lines web listing page to check on space available. It all fell together for Dec. 1-8.  I called Dan and asked if he wanted to come and he was enthusiastic to bring his eleven year old Christine.  Our son, Dean said he'd make it a few days between his airline flights.  Yvette gave us permission to take our local grandson Stephen out of school and his teacher gave him an armload of homework to do on the trip.
    We flew from Orlando to Denver where we met Dean who had just come in from New York.  We all jumped on the United Shuttle over to Salt Lake City.  There we rented a minivan and headed down to Sandy to take care of renting gear for Dean and Stephen and getting the house provisioned for the week.  Early the next morning we headed out to Brighton and were pleasantly surprised with the quality and quantity of the snow for so early in the season.  After the big early snowfall, it hadn't snowed for a week and didn't snow the whole time we were there.  We skied everyday in clear blue skies and warm thirty-five degree temperatures.  Dan and Christine came in from Fayettville/Tulsa midmorning, rented another car, and immediately made it up to Brighton for the afternoon.  This was Christine's very first ski trip so she was excited.  We didn't meet up with them until that evening at the house.  The high point at Brighton was skiing Aspen Glow with Stephen.  It is a groomed but steep black diamond (expert) run.  Stephen showed no fear of the speed or the fall line.  I accidently got Yvonne, Stephen  and Dean off onto Thor which is a really convoluted bumpy trail that you just have to work your way down.  None of us really like moguls much but we all made it down okay.
    The second day of skiing we went to Alta which had the best snow conditions with hardly any rocks at all sticking through the snow on the groomed runs.  Then we did Snowbird, Alta, Snowbird, and Alta on our remaining days.  Christine improved the most of any of us and by week's end was racing down blue intermediate runs with no problems.  Stephen took about half a day to get back to his expert form.  He is a good skier and fearless on the slopes. Yvonne always skis in comfort mode which is an order of magnitude slower than the rest of us, but she has fun and makes it down even the steepest blue runs. Dean hadn't skied for two years, but picked up right where he left off and skied better than me and almost as well as Dan.  Dan is our instigator, always pushing the rest of us to go where no sane man should tred.  Actually that was good for me because he would taunt me until I'd go on some moguls or steep runs that I wouldn't dare on my own. At Snowbird he took Dean and me and later young Stephen over to the Road to Provo which is a fairly long road with a sheer cliff drop to one side. I dislike roads anyway and hate ones with cliffs off the edge.  We made it down the road to a beautiful bowl of ungroomed snow that was probably the best skiing of the week.  In the bowl there were few trees and massive expanses of white with majestic peaks for a backdrop.  Most of us liked Alta the best but I prefer Snowbird by a small margin.  They have some long intermediate runs called Election and Banana that you can ski full out or at any comfortable speed.  I call them ego runs.
   Dean could only ski three days so did each resort once.  He and Dan made a fun pair and enjoyed escaping the old man to do some "manly" skiing by themselves. Saying that I don't think either Stephen or Steve held them up much.  We all went out for a good prime rib or steak dinner on Dean's final night. Other than that we scronged up whatever we had in the house for dinners and tried to stay awake until nine pm before crashing exhausted into bed.
    At Alta they have a couple of nice long intermediate runs from the top of the Sugerloaf lift.  Alternately you can do Sugar Bowl which is a fun expert run with an infinite number of ways to ski down it. I really liked that short hard hill.  On our last ski day, Dan again harrassed Stehen and I to do Amen which is a bumpy black run.  Dan went first, followed by Stephen and with me trailing to pick up the pieces.  Being older than dirt, I stopped to rest about a third of the way down and Dan stopped about half way down.  Stephen just continued weaving through the moguls down to the bottom as we watched the eight year old.  Dan sighed and said, "I think that's the way we're supposed to do it, Uncle Steve."  I thought that about said it all.  Dan also took me to the other Alta mountain where the fool put me on another black mogul run.  And then we had a hairy traverse on a path no wider than two skis over to another steep bowl.  At least this one's bumps were small and we skied it like the experts we wished we were.
    Yvonne had one bad day when everything seemed to go wrong.  Her legs weren't working right, and her boots didn't feel good.  Then her buckle caught on the stair in the restaurant and she fell down on the stairs, bruising her butt, her ego, and spraining her fingers.  That ended that day of skiing for her.  We bought some inserts for her boots, adjusted them for her, soothed her with words of love like, "Straighten up you silly wench.  This is costing big bucks!".  Well it worked because the next day she had her very best day of the week and skied like a pro.
    It was really great having two youngsters (three counting Dan) along on the trip.  Christine and Stephen got along perfectly and played and studied together.  Dan took them to see the Grinch one night and shopping another.  Both (or all) of the kids were assets to our trip.  Next time Christine will be doing great parallel turns and hockey stops, and I hate to even think what Stephen will be doing.  Oh one more story that is funny in retrospect.  We were at Snowbird and Stephen and I were going about 300mph down the final hill to the GadZoom lift.  There is the MidGad lift right next to it and Stephen didn't see the guide ropes for that lift.  He hit them going full speed and went from warp speed to zero in about four feet.  Somehow other than a bruise on the legs where the rope cut him down he was uninjured so we could have a good chuckle about how funny he looked.  I really think his helmet saved him on that one.  On Dan's second to last run of the week he collided with another skiier and slid off the trail into some deep snow where he could have been hurt, but he was too busy searching for his lost ski to worry about pain.  I was absolutely, positively perfect the whole week skiing with perfect control like on a magic carpet--except of one teensy time on the first mogul of a hill, where I was admiring my grandson zipping down the bumps and the next thing I knew I was crashing onto my elbnow and helmet protected head.  Still don't have a clue what stupidity I perpetuated to have that happen.
    The whole trip just couldn't have been better.  Good skiing, good company.  I know I loved the whole experience.

Steve