The story below was originally published in Utah Stories, an awesome local publication that seeks to produce stories with meaning that help promote and sustain the threads of local community. To check out more of their articles and their multimodal digital content, click here.
It’s a bluebird day on the slopes at Alta, and a group of ten people are gathered at the top of the Sunnyside lift. Instead of skiing through the trees, they’re going to pay the trees a visit. This is Trees and Skis, one of many events hosted by the Alta Environmental Center.
Ian Peisner from TreeUtah is the group’s leader. He takes them halfway down the Crooked Mile run until he reaches a small clump of subalpine firs and Engelmann spruce. Here he stops, and in his friendly engaging way, Peisner starts to tell the group about these trees: How to identify them by bark, needle, and cone, and how they’ve been cultivated for the good of skiers and the good of the mountain.
“In a lot of places, the trees were cut away to make the ski runs,” Peisner says. “But at Alta, the trees were planted to make the ski runs.”
The silver miners in the town of Alta had cut down all the timber for building materials, making devastating avalanches common. When the mining boom was over, the Forest Service hired men for a Civilian Conservation Corps project to replant trees so a ski area could be created.
Alta still operates on public lands leased from the Forest Service. The Alta Environmental Center was created in 2008 to help protect this land and support the ski area’s sustainability efforts. Tours are free and are designed to share all aspects of Alta history and ecology, like Alta’s importance to the watershed.
“People are always surprised to learn that this is our drinking water,” says Lisa Runyon, referring to the snow underfoot. Runyon is a volunteer naturalist Ranger who co-hosts the Ski With a Ranger tours. Rangers are trained by the Cottonwood Canyons Foundation, a non-political non-profit specifically focused on watershed protection and education. Skiers stopping by the Albion Day Lodge on a mid-morning break might see volunteers staffing a table with photos of local animals like snowshoe hare, ermine, ptarmigan, and Alta’s famous porcupine. They’ll also discover tracking signs to look for, including fur, footprints, and scat.
Later that afternoon, on the Ski With a Ranger tour, Runyon leads the group right to several sets of animal tracks. “Even though you’re here to ski, there’s a lot of other life going on in the canyon,” she reminds them.
Visitors who choose the Snowshoe with a Naturalist tour will absorb a lesson in Alta’s ecology and geology while hiking up the currently snowy Summer Road at the very end of Little Cottonwood Canyon. This year, thanks to a generous corporate grant covering the price of snowshoe rentals, children from several Salt Lake area schools will also get to participate.
Journey Through Historical Snowscapes focuses on Alta’s history as a silver mining town and its colorful founding fathers, like George Watson, who had bought up all the silver mining claims but was too broke to pay the taxes. He donated his claims to the Forest Service to make Alta ski area and named himself Alta’s mayor.
“I think that a big part of Alta culture is understanding and holding onto the traditions,” says Jennifer Melton, Director of the Alta Environmental Center. She notes that some of the most important and colorful figures of American ski history made their lives here, skiing steep routes in leather boots and unsophisticated wooden skis, and wearing layers of wool and cotton, not Gore-Tex. Their stories continue to be told on Alta’s historical tours.
Melton wants people to come up and experience Alta. “It’s just such a special and unique place,” she says. “If you’re new or don’t know a lot about the canyon or what there is to do outside of skiing, join some of our events on snowshoes. Come out with a sense of curiosity and learn something new.”
A group of guests on the ski lift are certainly impressed. They’re in the middle of a Birding on Skis tour and universally exclaim how surprised they are at the number of birds they’ve seen. The leader of their tour, Bryant Olson, is a conservation ecologist from Tracy Aviary. On this tour, he staked out spots by the bird feeders and called in Mountain chickadees and Red-breasted nuthatches.
Alta Environmental Center tours are free and run from January through mid-April. Ski-based tours require a lift ticket. Snowshoe-based tours are totally free — just bring your gear. Rentals are also available at the Alta Ski Shop in the Albion Day Lodge. Check the website for registration and parking information. Winter activities wrap up with a big celebration on Alta Earth Day, April 12.
The Alta Environmental Center hopes that an interest in their winter programming will spark an interest in their summer programming as well. Replanting trees is important because small saplings often sprout up on the runs where they’ll be pummeled by skiers and snow grooming machines. To give them a better chance of survival, TreeUtah harvests saplings and takes them to an on-site nursery where they are cared for by Alta Environmental Center staff until replanting. The public is welcome to participate in hiking, tree-planting, restoration and weed-pulling when the snow melts.
