Little House on the Mound: Due to weather we "had" to stay in Park City an extra day

With a major storm making havoc of all the highways between Park City and Texas, we decided to stay another day. So with an extra day and plenty of deep virgin snow behind the house on Ecker hill, what to do? I got my old familiar almost "backcountry" xc skis, and decided to check out the trails behind our house that I know so well from summer hikes and mountain bike rides.

This is from the trail about half way up Ecker Hill on the north side. Our house is about in the middle of the picture.

If you're not familiar with these trails, the trail up Ecker Hill starts with series of long switch backs up the north side and then a long a traverse around to the back where the trail divides, one goes on up to the summit of Ecker hill and the other trail continues down a little draw and up some more switch backs and traverses up to the top of the next ridge where a water tank is located. From the bottom to this fork the trail had been used (snow broken) by someone on snowshoes within the last day or so and only 3 or 4 inches had fallen since that use (made for pretty easy going on skis), but that all ended here. This is the trail to the top of Ecker hill (before and after ascent)

My fellow Americans, the Flag still proudly waves on the top of Ecker hill

I then headed up to the "tank". I'm following a rabbit

The rabbit apparently gave up

Almost to the "tank" (the rabbit is back)

Same view on the way back

This is from the other side of the tank. From where this was taken you can take some tight switchbacks down to the road, walk on the road a short distance to the cul de sac you see here (with the hard to miss yellow house in the middle of this picture) and from there to the right take a trail that leads to the mid mountain trail (up to the Canyons, Park City and Deer Valley ski resorts). I did that one summer, but not today due to time and exhaustion (really mostly the later)

This is a view of the back side of Ecker hill taken from the "tank" . If you look carefully, you can just barely see the flag

It is hard to explain how hard it is breaking a trail in snow this deep uphill on skis (deep snow, gravity and slippery skis seem to conspire against the effort) and up close the result is not always the neat double lines.