MASSIVE Search for Utah Powder

“I have no idea where we are,” CP (Tanner’s filmer) screams. He rests his forehead on his fists and then bangs them violently into the steering wheel. “Oh God, we’re lost,” he continues as the truck sits at the head of a long driveway to a big new house in a massive subdivision outside Park City. More banging. This goes on for five minutes or so, all the while Callum Pettit is growing more frantic that CP is freaking out.

“CP, just get out to the highway and drive,” Callum shouts, “We’ll figure it out man, jeez!” Feverishly, looking over one shoulder, then the other, Callum is trying to see the highway through the houses and fog forming on the windows in the truck’s cab. CP is driving Callum and Sean Pettit from the Salt Lake City airport to Tanner Hall’s house, which he says is a good two-hour drive. It’s only been 45 minutes. CP lets out one more shout, and then sighs like he’s just plain given up. Callum is terrified, eyes growing wider as CP puts the truck in gear and continues up the driveway to the house.

“We’re here,” CP cheerfully exclaims as he throws the truck in park. Callum is stupefied. CP laughs wildly, walks into Tanner’s garage, and leaves Callum in the truck with his bags.

A simple practical joke? Perhaps, but it may also be a barometer of how on edge Tanner and his crew are after spending a week flying to Austria, finding out the snow was terrible, and flying back to Utah to continue the mission to get footage for Tanner’s next film, “The Massive.” And the thing with the Austria debacle is that it was just the last event in a month long string of poor luck with finding good snow for filming. Utah has to be better. It surely can’t be worse.

Utah delivers and the skies puke for the next two days. We loaf about Tanner’s house and watch the snow pile up outside the two-story windows in his living room. Tanner spends the days icing his ankle and attending physical therapy religiously. He tweaked his ankle a bit in Austria and will be off it for a week or so. In the meantime, the crew—The Pettits and Ian and Neil Provo—load up a trailer with a handful powerful mountain snowmobiles and prepare to invade the backcountry around Logan, Utah.

We arrive at the trailhead well before sunrise. A quick three-mile buzz up a groomed trail, we spill out onto a frozen lake. The scene that lay before us is hard to describe. The small lake is rimmed by ridgeline probably a mile long. It’s littered with spines, chutes, flutes, pillows, and mandatory airs. And it’s steep. The sun crests the horizon and the face is aglow in pinkish light. The line possibilities are endless.

For an hour the silence is only broken by the yells of “three, two, one, dropping” and the hoots that follow. Inevitably, we hear the drone of more sleds ripping up the trail. We knew we wouldn’t be alone out here, but nobody was prepared for the fury that was about to be unleashed upon us.

The scene that now lay before us is equally hard to describe. Somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty slednecks descend on our zone and roost around the lake in deafening two-stroke. They gather in a group for a few minutes and the chaos is reduced to the low rumble of idling engines. Then the guns come out. Just some good ol’ boys shooting off in the air, but the sound of clips being unloaded sends some of instinctively diving for cover. The icing on the cake comes with the helicopter. Out to film the mayhem for the slednecks, its arrival triggers a symphony of brap-brapping.

Spreading out like locusts on a fresh crop, the sledneckers devour every single inch of fresh snow that their sleds will take them to, which is pretty much all of our landing zones off the ridge. Game over. We move up the valley a bit, set up a shot with an untracked landing, and seconds before Sean Pettit is set to drop in a rouge slednecker arcs a highmark across Sean’s line. Game over.

We do manage to get off a few nice shots in other zones for “The Massive,” but our day ends a bit earlier than expected. The disappointment runs deep. We literally traveled across oceans and spent a week preparing for this day, but such is life in the ski game and such is life when you are accessing terrain with sleds. We are still clinging to one last hope. A zone in the Uintas the Provo’s know about. North facing with high-elevation, it’s our only chance for good snow in Utah. Back to the trucks, the journey pushes on.

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