January 16, 2011

Grand Targhee | January 15, 2011

Bozeman has been beautiful, I’ve had some amazing powder days during my 18 day trip and it just gets better each day. Four of us decided to head to Alta, Wyoming and scope out the famed Grand Targhee Resort — myself, my brother, Andrew Whitney and Nick Marchi. There was a big warm up that effected resorts up North like Revelstoke, BC as well as Montana resorts like Bridger, Big Sky and Moonlight…a ton of snow melted down low and conditions up high were mushy and creamy. This surely isn’t a complaint, just an observation — and in light of this beautiful vacation we decided to search for some deeper snow. Whitefish is a resort up in Northern Montana, they had quite a bit of snow in the last few days and expecting much more but Targhee looked like it was in the sweet spot. Grand Targhee was a shorter drive and Casey had been there before so it was a little more familiar. Certainly the thought of skiing the Tetons was pretty attractive as well, we promptly got on the road to the ‘Ghee. We knew significant snow was coming but wasn’t quite sure how bad the roads would be. I will say I have never experienced a drive such as the one we took yesterday afternoon. Most of the 4 hour drive was in daylight but it was still tremendously rough cruise through some eye opening terrain. We made it safe and checked into the resort, Targhee has 250″ of snow this season, and up until the Mammoth storms it had the most snow in the country thus far.
We had a few drinks at the local pub and hit the sack, expecting there would be some snowfall overnight and things would be epic in the morning. Well it snowed 2″ overnight, which was sick but apparently Targhee has a reputation for being foggy, thus dubbed “Grand Foghee” (as a local told me on the lift). It took a little trail map studying to find the goods but we found some. Enjoy the edit, back to Bridger on Monday — BRING THE POW!