Park City, Utah – Perhaps it was the toothy smile that accompanied the statement, or the excited eyes that conveyed her eagerness. But it seemed obvious to all 12 skiers in the room that guide Deb Lovci-Engel was sincere as she greeted the group.
“Welcome to Deer Valley,” Lovci-Engel said. “It’s going to be a special day.”
It soon became evident that nearly every day is special for Lovci-Engel, a Boulder native who moved to Park City 16 years ago to pursue her passion for the outdoors.
An Xterra triathlete, snowshoe racer and cross country skiing fanatic, Lovci-Engel is the type of person who can find “special” in interval training in an ice storm. But after 16 years as a guide and operations manager for the Utah Interconnect Adventure Tour, she also understands what her clients are after. And it had arrived the night before in a 20-inch pile of Utah powder snow.
Lovci-Engel had been awake since 5:30 a.m., scanning the avalanche reports and consulting with co-worker Brian Brechwald, who doubles as a climbing guide for industry heavyweights Exum Guides. The verdict was unanimous: Conditions were extraordinary. There was no time to waste.
Boots were buckled as avalanche beacons were passed around the room and Brechwald went into his speech outlining the Interconnect Tour. If things went as planned, the group could expect to travel a full 25 miles between six ski areas – Deer Valley Resort, Park City Mountain Resort, Solitude Mountain Resort, Brighton Resort, Alta Ski Area and Snowbird Ski and Summer Resort – using a combination of lifts and legwork to gain 16,000 vertical feet, and, of course, ski it all back down.
“This tour is unique to Utah,” Brechwald said. “There’s no other place in the U.S. you can do this, connecting six resorts in one day.”
While places such as Beaver Creek in Colorado tout their “village to village” ski experience within resort boundaries, the Utah Interconnect arguably is a more traditional model of original European ski touring.
Because major ski mountains of the Wasatch Mountain Range near Salt Lake City are separated only by narrow drainages surrounded by snow-covered slopes, easily accessible backcountry ski lines link the resorts from Park City to Big and Little Cottonwood canyons, where chairlifts transport skiers back to the mountaintops.
Think of it as the ultimate in “yo-yo” skiing.
Tours depart daily from Deer Valley Resort or Snowbird Ski and Summer Resort, weather and conditions permitting, offering advanced skiers the opportunity to experience the stunning scenery and impressive ski terrain of the Wasatch Mountains.
Not designed for the timid (or for snowboarding, which is not allowed), the trip requires some walking, traversing and the ability to ski in diverse snow conditions. Interconnect Adventure Tour guides are trained in snow safety and backcountry etiquette.
“This isn’t a backcountry course,” Brechwald said. “Putting on a beacon doesn’t make you an expert, and we’re not here to try to turn you into one.
“If you have questions about the beacons through the course of the day, we’ll be happy to answer them and teach you a little, but that’s not our objective.”
Instead, the objective was to find as much deep, untracked snow between Deer Valley and Snowbird as the day would allow.
Deer Valley, which became a part of the tour just last season, served as the starting point, and after a couple of high-speed lift rides, a simple rope crossing carried the group into Park City’s McConkey Bowl for an early taste of fresh inbounds snow. Two more lift rides out to Jupiter Bowl, and it was out the backcountry gate to Big Cottonwood Canyon down a line known as the “Backdoor.”
“Welcome to Solitude,” Lovci- Engel said after the first tracks were laid down the gentle slope leading to the drainage base.
After riding the Solitude lifts to the summit, the object of Lovci-Engel’s anticipation became apparent. Just beyond the backcountry gate separating Solitude and Brighton was an area known as the Highway to Heaven, a 1,500-vertical-foot drop through untracked over-the-knees snow.
“I’m so excited,” she said. “It’s the first time conditions have allowed us to ski this all year.”
The run off the Highway lived up to its lofty billing, but it wasn’t until after lunch back at the base of Solitude that the real action got underway. After evaluating the strength of the group, the guides opted for a more challenging line up a rocky spine known as Fantasy Ridge in order to ski a big backcountry route of nearly 2,000 vertical feet down to Alta in Little Cottonwood Canyon.
Brechwald believes the Interconnect Tour suffers some misconceptions among local Wasatch backcountry enthusiasts who take advantage of the easy access afforded by cheap single-ride lift tickets at Solitude or similarly economical punch cards at Brighton. He revels in disproving the notion that the tour is anything shy of the real deal.
“This isn’t a powder puff tour. We take you to the goods,” Brechwald said. “Given a relatively strong group, we can ski some pretty major stuff. We have plenty of options. And we could put together another tour tomorrow that’s completely different. We’d never cross our own tracks.”
Crossing anyone’s ski tracks proved challenging on the day’s final run down to Grizzly Gulch in Little Cottonwood Canyon. The difficult access up Fantasy Ridge – another of Lovci-Engel’s “special” routes – weaned the majority of the ski traffic from the slope down to the valley, leaving acres of the so-called “greatest snow on Earth” even late in the day.
“That was epic to me, magical. I’ll remember that run for a long time,” Park City skier Andy Seppi, 46, said afterward. “I don’t have a lot of backcountry experience, and I don’t have the snow- safety skills to do this kind of thing on my own.
“It’s a little intimidating to try to determine what’s safe and what isn’t. Some of that stuff we skied today, I don’t know if I would have skied it without the guides.”
Staff writer Scott Willoughby can be reached at 303-820-1993 or swilloughby@denverpost.com.
