GMD DISPATCH 8.0: Going Home

The end

As we finished our last 3.2 High Life atop the ridge above Alta’s High Rustler, a group of friends and I watched the sun dip behind the grandiose peak of Mount Superior. We had sung the closing national anthem, and most of the several hundred attendees of the annual High Boy party had already made the drunken ski down. But we weren’t quite ready to go home. The sunset was a symbolic demarcation of the end of the party, the season and our freshmen year at Alta.

After making the sloppy ski to the base, we sat on the still Collins chairlift one last time, welcomed dusk and recounted our favorite days of the season, not quite ready to go inside, change out of our costumes and finish packing. With 660 inches of snowfall, there were countless favorite moments. Even in the last week of the season, another 40 inches fell before two gorgeous and hot days to close out the winter. The last days felt like the end of a school year—sunny, debaucherous and free. After streaking the Rustler Lodge and Alta Lodge employee photos (pictures available for purchase at peakphotoalta.com), a group of 14 Goldminer’s Daughter employees skied about 2,500 feet, from Baldy’s Main Chute to Westward Ho, in the nude. It was cold, but the spread-eagles were as stylie as ever.

But now, that is a distant thought—a memory within an incredible winter for which I am already nostalgic. I am now thousands of miles from Alta, though it is still snowing there, we’ve long been asked to leave our barracks. Most of my friends in Alta and I have already decided that it will be hard not to return for another winter. And maybe, after a season like ’07-08, we’ll be asking for disappointment. But I remember thinking, even deep into a snow-less two-week spell, while skiing with about a dozen of my friends, how much fun I was still having. Even when there is no snow it just feels good to be playing in the mountains with your buddies. At this point in my life, I can’t really ask for much more than that. And so, while some of us will move on to med-school and law school and the Stanford-bound 18-year-old to undergraduate school, a lot of us will find summer employment elsewhere before returning to a new family and new home in Alta, Utah.

Cowboy and his sauce.