Visits from friends, lost and found iPhone, Moochies and snow?

Lots going on this week where to even start with this long overdue update, so last Monday we continued our As soon on TV food tour with another  "Diners Drive ins and Dives" location called Moochies (see DDD episode online here) Moochies is an old little hole in the wall down by the U of U campus that specializes in Meat Ball sandwiches and authentic Philly Cheese Steaks(cheese-wiz + provolone DAM!) another best so far, nothing I've back home can compare to the philly cheese steaks from this place , I can only assume this is how awesome they taste in Philly. I scored a great groupon deal for next weeks "as seen on TV" restaurant stop to Pat's BBQ another old school local favorite where people stand in line for hours to get their "burnt tips" more on our upcoming Pats trip in next weeks update.

Tuesday was another "Know Before You Go" Avalanche class this time at Brighton resort up Big Cottonwood Canyon a few minutes from work.

I went to one of these seminars a couple weeks ago but this one had more speakers, Brighton avalanche and patrol staff and some first hand accounts of locals who had been in past and recent avalanches. They also went over all names of the backcountry areas around Brighton and how the Backcountry gates and policies worked and went into detail as to what was going on with the local off resort snow pack. So at the end they did a raffle where they asked questions I answered a question and got a killer Eddie Bauer First Ascent knit hat that matches my north face puffy jacket, score! I start Backcountry 101 at Brighton Thursday night so it was nice to meet some of the instructors. Also it sounds like I'm going to get the opportunity to help with the avalanche dog training which is something I've wanted to do since learning about these incredible animals.

Ops's snack table :-)

Friday was my holiday lunch at work and since it's a small office here in Salt Lake their able to treat us to a nice holiday meal, lets just say I ate crab cakes, prime rib, twice baked potatoes and fancy desserts until I was literally sick to my stomach I guess that's what I get for being a gluttonous heathen sinner :-)

After my work lunch I left work early to pick up Robin at the SLC airport and finished up working from home until Aubs got done with her never ending training program and studying for her Aerie job at Snowbird. After picking up Aubs we went to the Hog Wallow Pub near the base of Big Cottonwood for the girls to get caught up over a couple micro brews.

Hog Wallow Pub, BCC skier\boarder hangout

After beers we made a whole foods run so Aubs could grab some ingredients to make her incredible vegi spaghetti and wait for Canada to arrive from the airport around midnight, we were riding the next day and I had been up early and wanted to ride early the next day so I went off to bed. The following shenanigans unfolded while I tried to sleep.Princesses and Pineapples 

Canada finally arrived after picking up the rental car and eventually we all made it to bed by around 3am(yea I was cranky)

The next day some of us hopped up and some of us crawled out of bed to head to Brighton, groomers were good but due to an uncharacteristic lack of fresh snow riding anything steep or in the woods is pretty much out of the question unless your brave the closed signs and have a dedicated rock board and helmet.

Now onto the lost and found iPhone, with the group I didn't have my normal helmet\phone speakers plugged in so I could talk to people and help direct the group. I must have taken my iphone out of my pocket to take a pictures or send a text and never zipped up my pocket and then I took a head over heals tumble and my phone popped out and without it feeding my helmet music I never realized it , yep dumb early season mistake. As soon as we called it a day I threw my jacket in the back of the car with the rest of the gear and drove off assuming it was safe in one of my many cavernous jacket pockets, we stopped at Hogs Wallow to meet Lizzy for some apps and libations and headed home.

After bringing all my gear in and getting into something more comfortable I realized I started looking for my phone in earnest after checking and re-checking all my gear and the car several times I realized sometime was terribly wrong.

So I did what any good iphone owner would do and pulled up my account on icloud.com apples new cloud additional with iOS5 that lets you access all the information you back up on the cloud as well as use "Find my iPhone" via a PC instead of needing another iPhone(or iOS device) I was nervous before I even clicked on the "Find" button but my heat sank when the picture came up showing the current location of my phone.

Yep that's right it was 9pm and my iPhone4 was less than a 100 feet below the Crest express lift at around 9500ft(3000meters) and I was at home sitting behind my computer looking at it on Google maps in my base layers.  Good news was I knew where it was , had it's rough GPS coordinates(within 10 meters) and at least 2 other iPhones I could use to pinpoint it. bad news was is I had no clue how much battery I had left and whether or not it was sitting on the surface where I'd be able to walk right up, grab it and head out on my merry way.   between work and finding a place to live Lizzy hadn't really had a good opportunity to ride since she's gotten here so she wanted to ride Brighton the next morning I figured I could use the help finding my phone so after some time in the hot tub I sulked off to bed with a heavy heart and hopes that I had at least a 50\50 chance of finding it the next morning.

I woke up the next morning and my phone was still responding to location requests which meant I had battery power left and hopes that I could find my phone via the "find my phone" loud audible ping alert.

Crest express is one of the only 3 lifts running so Lizzy and I headed up with hopes we'd find it right away and be able to enjoy a nice day of riding relieved that I didn't have to buy a new phone.

Getting off the lift I double checked the location of my phone versus the top of the and according to the map it was exactly where I took the fall and I sent the "play sound" signal. I watched the map displaying both my location and the last known location of my phone get closer and closer to each other as we made our way down the run until according to the map I was right on top of it, Lizzy and I sat on the side of the run and I could hear a very faint sound I can only describe as the sonar ping you hear on submarine movies. We looked everywhere on the surface visually but couldn't find it and the "pinging" noise stopped. Hoping my battery didn't just die I sent another signal for my phone to make the ping noise. This time we could clearly hear it and follow the noise to a patch of snow about 1\2 way up the hill. I still couldn't see it but I could certainly hear it somewhere under the rock hard wind blown snow pack. For some reason at this point I got a little frantic and started punching my was through the snow but it was so hard all I was doing was packing it down and muffling the noise further. I then lifted my boot and kicked the snow with my heal resulting in a large rock like piece of snow and my beeping phone com tumbling out.

YES found my phone under the rock hard snow!!!

Finding my phone I was obviously relieved and Lizzy and I spent the next 4-5 hours riding on a warm, wonderful , bluebird day.

Lizzy and I finished up at Brighton and then headed back to CottonWood Heights where Lizzy headed home to Park City and I met up with the rest of the crew for lunch at our new found favorite and oldest restaurant in Utah called Ruth's diner(See more about Ruth's diner in previous blog entries) up in Emigration Canyon.

After a late lunch we went home and Canada packed up his things in preparation for his flight home at 8pm that evening but before his trip home we headed up to Lizzy's so Robin and Canada could see Park City and Lizzy's local haunt called O'Shucks.

Aubrey and I were exhausted and both had early morning work commitments so we left Robin in Lizzy's very capable hands for a night on the in Park City.

The next day Aubrey and Robin made a trip to Snowbird for an actual powder day

Dinner at Lizzy's, more westbound friends, gear upgrades, Know before you go and GoPro down!

After 2 short work weeks this one seemed to last an eternity, when I finally left at nearly 7pm Friday night I had over 55 hours in and was ready for a Saturday morning of snowboarding, dinner at a friends and lazy Sunday around the house.

Along with our first "In & Out burger" experience after work Friday night Aubrey and I went to a hole in the wall Japanese restaurant with an extensive authentic menu called Koko's Kitchen. With a large ethnic variety of takeout customer traffic I had high hopes but long story short it ended up being a good value(large portions+cheap) but the quality of the actual sushi left something to be desired, I'm thinking we should have gotten some of the warm food as that's what everyone picking up takeout had ordered. We red boxed "Crazy, Stupid Love" on the way home and settled into the couch for Friday night movie night.

I woke up to reports of 3 inches of fresh snow overnight at Brighton, measly amounts by Utah standards but with almost the entire inter-mountain west being mostly dry we'll take whatever we can get. Weather people say storm windows is gonna start opening around mid December and we sure wish it would hurry. While I wished for more snow Saturday was nice the sun was out, temps were good and lift lines non existent one you left the base area. I was by myself so I figured this would be as good a time as any to try our my newly stickied GoPro snowboard mounts and new Smith Turbo Fan Prophesy goggle.


First off I was told ahead of time to be wary of using the included sticky mounts on my snowboard but I figured if I attached it carefully I'd be fine.
                                 

The mount was a giant fail boat but short entertaining HD video

Click YouTube Link for HD /\

Back to the drawing board on snowboard nose\tail mount project have to buy something free solution is not going to work out.  Also didn't have time to fully charge battery so I spent the remainder of the day testing the still photo mode of the GoPro Hero2.

Brighton opens this week for night skiing, it's lit all the way from the top of Crecent lift to the base, total night riding acreage is about the size of AftonAlps but much narrower and longer of course.

Old smiling Bob here(Above) is telling me about how much fun it is to hike to the "unlit" adjacent potions of the mountains for take moonlit runs back to the base.

                                 Not to bad, a little bit of fresh and almost nothing iced over yet

Looking off the backside of Brighton, that's all off resort hiking area I plan on becoming very familiar with this winter but not without a partner and my avy gear.

    Ahh Solitude

                                                 Looking towards the base of Brighton

 Looking up to the highest point of Brighton, need more snow to get Great Western lift running to access :-(


After Snowboarding we drove to Lizzy's place in Park City for beers and nice dinner of spagetti and lamb meatballs with her room mate Laura and too many of their new friends for me to remember.

Thats Lizzy\Laura and soon to be Ryan's place like 2 blocks from Park City Mountain Resort lifts

Smith Prophesy Turbo Fan  OTG Goggle 

So this brings me to a brief product review of my new goggles(see them at the end of my above video), I've always wanted winter goggles I could wear a pair of prescription glasses under so when I happened upon a 50% off coupon for smith optics web site I jumped at the opportunity. Although not 100% necessary being able to wear my glasses with goggles might come in handy in the backcountry while studying snow crystal charts, distant snow surface conditions, making slope angle estimates. These are also the "TurboFan" series which have a high quality fan built into the top center with a two stage switch built into strap. You can see the black switch on the right hand side of the above picture. Iv'e had fans built into previous paintball goggles and they were a godsend, this concept works wonderfully especially for those of us that wear face masks that tend to send your warm moist breath directly up into your goggles. So if you wear glasses(their fine with or without glasses) and\or ever have an issues with goggle fogging for your active winter activities save your pennies and invest in a par of these you will not be sorry. They also leverage Smith's AirEvac Goggle+Helmet integration system which I take advantage of with the Smith Helmet+Goggle combination.

Utah's Know Before You Go Avalanche Safety Program

I attended my first in person avalanche training seminar last Thursday called "Know Before You Go" it's a free program they have all over the state that consists of a 1.5 hour presentation followed up with question\answer and very basic in store equipment(beacon, shovel, probe) demonstrations. This is a very basic free presentation only meant to inform people completely new to the danger of avalanches winter travel in mountainous terrain. The presenter(whose name escapes me) is the real deal, he was a Heli guide in the Chugach range in Alaska for over 6 years with many appearances in both Warren Miller and TGR films. He is now the head of avalanch patrol at Alta ski resort and the sole operator of the onsite howitzer used to control far off difficult to reach avalanche danger zones, this guy is the real deal and has seen and done it all including being dug out of an avalanche and digging dead and critically injured best friends. See a great video of what these guys do to keep us resort folks safe here.


My actual hands-on, classroom and avalanche field training starts at brighton in 2 weeks, now that I have all my own "Avy" gear I can take this 3 day class and spend time at the local Beacon practice fields located at

SnowBird, Solitude and the Canyons. I almost hiked and rode Gaurdsman's pass Saturday afternoon but didn't have any water or backpack with me not to mention was alone so I thought better of it and went home instead of possibly getting myself in over my head 3 weeks into our winter adventure. I spent ALOT of time researching and talking with experts(online and in person) about the various avalanche beacon brands\models with an emphasis on range\sensitivity and ease of use.

My Black Diamond AvaLung backpack, K2 rescue Shovel, Black Diamond Avalanche Probe and Pieps DSP Smart Transmitter, all set just a few more minor items to add to the list!

Friends Incoming!

Our good friends Robin and Canada are getting into town on Friday to visit and of course go snowboarding and skiing this weekend. Canada's one of our good friends and Afton Alps ex first tracks crew member who moved to Southern California the summer before last, we miss him and his antics, it'll be nice not to be the only nerd in the house for a couple days. Robin's one of Aubrey's long time friends from Bennigans who's studying to be a Doctor(MD) down in Kansas City were so excited to have them both staying with us and miss them bunches.

Canada and Robin 

Also another one of our good friends(met through Lizzy who moved to Utah ahead of us) and backpacking\climbing partners Ryan Wilkus is coming to stay with Lizzy for the winter. I'm really looking forward to sharing some epic backcountry experiences with Ryan and my new found friend and avalanche mentor Logan......say tuned for more pictures, video's and stories from next weekend!

Lizzy and Ryan

 Love and miss everyone at home and abroad were doing fine and hope all is well with you and yours!