Weekly Newsletter: November 27th - December 3rd, 2023

This week was filled with holiday festivities and we finally started our 2023-2024 ski season! 🥳 ⛷️ The holidays are always such a great time of the year. It's so much fun to partake in the annual community and company celebrations.

Check out our new posts and videos 🆕 🎥 📝

Two-Week Road Trip Through Oregon with Friends: Part 3

We continued our trip from the Oregon coast inland to Crater Lake National Park. This is part 3 of the multi-part series.

Keith and LindseyLindsey Huster

Orem "Lights On" ceremony 🎄🎅

We attended the annual Orem City "Lights On" ceremony held this year at the Orem City Center Park. Local events like this are such a fun way to kick off the holiday season. This specific event included a small farmers market, food trucks, some live music, and a tree-lighting ceremony. We enjoyed attending this event and the free hot chocolate and donuts were a bonus! 🍩

Lindsey's office Christmas party 🎄 🥂

The company that Lindsey works for held their annual Christmas party this year at the Red Pine Lodge on the Park City ski mountain. The evening started with receiving a cup of hot chocolate as we boarded the Red Pine Gondola for a quick 10-minute ride up the mountain to the lodge.

At the lodge, we were greeted with an assortment of snacks and drinks. We mingled for about 30 minutes before being seated with some of Lindsey's team members. We were then treated to a wonderful dinner buffet and dessert bar. The night was capped off with a company-wide bingo game in which you could win your choice from a selection of prizes. Lindsey won an electric blanket which will come in handy this time of the year.

We didn't take any pictures during the event since there were so many other employees there. So, we snapped a few pictures in the Canyons Village as we made our way back to the car.

The drive home that evening was a white-knuckle experience. It had snowed the entire time we were at the Christmas party. As we drove home, we encountered a nearly un-plowed road through the winding Provo Canyon. This road can be treacherous when the conditions are good so it was especially concerning that the road conditions were as bad as they were. Thankfully, all of the other drivers on the road were driving as cautiously as we were so everyone made it home safe and sound. 😅

2023-2024 ski season kickoff! ⛷️ 🏔️

Our ski season has officially started... finally! Last year, we had already skied a few times by this point and the mountains were close to 100% open. This year though, Utah is getting a slow start to the season and most resorts that are open only have very limited terrain available. Regardless, we were both super excited to be back skiing at Snowbird for another season.

Even so, as luck would have it, we were treated to a massive multi-day snowstorm that dumped 3-4 feet (0.9-1.2 meters) of snow over the weekend. This made for epic ski conditions even though we only had a limited number of runs to choose from. The skiing on Saturday was fantastic thanks to the nearly 2 feet (0.6 meters) of light and fluffy powder that fell overnight! We met up with our friends Kelly and Paul and we all spent the day hunting out the fresh powder.

Sunday was another story though. The storm dumped another 18 inches (0.5 meters) of heavy, wet snow on the mountain. We arrived at Snowbird early as usual and we began waiting... and waiting... and waiting for the resort to open. Eventually, we had waited for over 3 hours and it was not looking like the resort was going to open anytime soon. So, we decided to cut our losses and head back down the mountain. Instead of skiing, we went to Penny Ann's Cafe for a delicious sourdough pancake breakfast.

It can sometimes be hard to give up a possible day of skiing after waiting so long but this time we found out that we had made the right decision. On our way down the mountain, we received a notification via the Snowbird app that they would be unable to open the resort due to too much natural avalanche activity in the area. Thankfully, we had gotten out of there before the massive crowd of upset skiers and boarders headed back to their vehicles.

Tour Divide training update 🚵‍♂️ 😅

This week, Keith spent all of his Tour Divide training time indoors riding Zwift virtual routes. Now that ski season has kicked off, Keith will have much less time to go on long training rides during the weekend. So, to maximize his training time, Keith will be focusing on indoor training sessions until the spring.

Throughout the week, Keith rode a total of 92 miles (148 kilometers) with a little over 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) of climbing. Keith also pushed himself a little by riding a 30-mile (48-kilometer) training session immediately after returning home from a hard day of skiing at Snowbird. These sorts of efforts will be great training for riding long distances on already tired leg muscles.

Upcoming posts and videos 👷‍ 👷‍♀️️

We have several exciting plans for the remainder of the year that we can't wait to share with you. We are also slowly working on some of the promised blog posts. We will get those out as soon as possible.

We will be making a limited number of ski videos this year (Lindsey is working on the first one now). We have decided to take a step back from focusing on YouTube content and instead put more energy into our blog.

We hope that you are enjoying our newsletters. Do you have any big plans for the upcoming holiday season? Let us know in the comments section below.👇 💬