Hardwear Sessions

More Pictures

Julia Niles and Andrew McLean bravely set off for a mid-winter MHW photoshoot. Andrew sent some great photographs and this short note:

The first day started off with very discouraging weather as it was flat, cloudy light and crusty snow down low. But, in the time it took us to make the first climb, the upper elevation clouds burned off and created a very cool lighting scenario with clouds on one side of the ridge and clear, sunny slopes on the other. We ended up on the summit of Mt. Superior which is one of the more classic peaks in the Wasatch, and much to my surprise, the skiing down the backside was excellent. I was expecting crusty, wind-jacked snow, but it was silky smooth old powder.

After skiing, we went down to Lone Star Taqueria, which is the Mexi-food place of choice for skiers and boarders. Once we got there, Julia all of a sudden goes, "Shit! I left that entire bag of samples in the parking lot!" We drove back to the Big Cottonwood Park & Ride, and there, half an hour later, was the bag of MHW samples sitting untouched right in the middle of the lot! Julia was psyched, to say the least.

The next day we ate more Mexi-food, cruised around downtown SLC and then went back up into Little Cottonwood Canyon. The weather service had issued a Winter Storm warning to start at 2:00pm and it arrived almost to the minute. We set up some tents near the LCC stream and it proceed to dump at a rate of about 2" per hour, so we also got some good bad weather photos.