By Steve
 |
| Snow Basin Sardine Peak Loop Map and Stats |
 |
| Beautiful trees on Sardine switchbacks |
Once the snow begins falling for the year, trail running becomes a new sport entirely. It becomes a mixture of running, ice skating, skiing, snowshoeing, and mountaineering. Let's call it trailskatoriing. One way to survive the winter while trailskatoriing is to find trails that are generally tracked out most of the winter. Some of my favorite trails include the Bonneville Shoreline trail, Mueller Park, Mt. Olympus, Grandeur, The Pipeline trail, and a handful of trails that surround ski resorts where people go snow-shoeing at locations where everyone else already goes snow-shoeing, and thus, ironically, completely absolving oneself of the need for snow-shoes at all. One such area is the sardine trail and summit that is directly to the north of the Snow Basin slopes.
Sam, Chris, Jackie, and I met at the bottom of Wheeler creek by the Pineview Dam in order to see if we could extend our loop to 20 miles. It turns out with warm weather combined with a snowy trail that has had too much foot traffic has the same effect as a Zamboni. The entire width of the Wheeler creek trail was as icy as the floor of the Olympic skating oval. After shuffling for a mile and a half, we turned up Icebox canyon, which completely lived up to its name by being in pretty much the same condition.
 |
| View of Snow Basin Ski Resort |
Once the sun came up and we were of the shadow of the mountain, the rest of the journey was a mixture of muddy and icy stretches. Generally, this is a great trail that was well built, with long slow switchbacks. As you get close to the summit of Sardine Peak, you hit a fork in the trail, which effectively runs a circle around the summit. With as much mountain biking, hiking, and snow-shoeing traffic as this area receives, it is quite surprising that there is not a trail from that loop around the summit which doesn't require bushwhacking through shrubs to actually get to the summit. It appears most people summit from the west, but that is based only on a slight decrease in shrubs on that side.
On our descent towards Snow Basin, the running was fantastic and speedy, even with the snow, ice, and mud. We took a 1.25 roundtrip detour to get out to the Ogden Overlook to add in the extra mileage and take a gander at the view.
 |
| victory chug |
Reaching Snow Basin, and about 12 miles into our run, we began to figure out the best way to get over to the Green Pond trail without crossing any ski slopes. We decided to take the main road south for a mile where we could then take a service road for 200 yards up to the single track. The road was an uphill climb, and Chris and I had a good laugh at Sam who has come to believe that running on pavement gives you cooties. Once we were back on the single track we headed south towards Green Pond.
To my surprise, the section of southbound single track between Snow Basin and the Green Pond junction was not tracked out at all. Once we reached the pond though, the running was again good and the trail tracked out. We took the longer, East Fork route back down to Art Nord, and then once again braved the skating rink for the 1.75 miles back down Wheeler Creek. So as far as trailskatoriing mountain runs go, I'd say this one is a good loop that, assuming you have good traction, should be a good one all winter long.
 |
| World famous Jackie leap |
 |
Running through a clearing, Sardine summit on far left
|
.JPG)
.jpg)
