After Salt Lake City, I flew to Denver to go meet Arturo half way through his long snowboarding trip. We started in Keystone just after a powder day the net morning:
we got two rides on the snowcat for a bit extra powder
once on north bowl, and once on south bowl
The next day, we went to Breckenridge. Weather was nice, a bit too nice. As a result the snow was not so great (good layer, but pretty icy and all the nice powder from the previous day was now not so good):
snow wasn't great, pretty crunchy
On the way back, found someone snowboarding with a parasail:
The next day, we moved farther West to Beaver Creek to get ourselves closer to Aspen, or next destination. Since the morning snow was not going to be great (freeze-thaw cycle), we used to the time to go check out the edges of the resort we had never seen before (and that there is no point to go see on a normal day). Beaver Creek turns out to be 3 resorts that got joined into a single one, but its edges aren't that interesting on a normal day, however that day we had nothing much better to do than to go check them out :)
skiing is hard work :)
After driving to the Aspen area (Snowmass), we went to Snowmass the next morning. By then I wasn't hopeful, and kind of expected crap snow, but we got super lucky, the snow was still very decent, with even fresh enough powder in places (which Snowmass nicely roped off to keep fresh for us when we arrived):
yeah, fresh snow for us
From the top of the cirque, the view on the other size was quite nice too:
Eventually we crossed to the other side of the resort (from the top of the cirque):
After doing headwall and the cirque several times, we went to the backcountry bit on the other side of the resort, but while the top view was nice, riding down wasn't the best snow anymore:
The last day, we drove to nearby Highlands to try its backcountry bowl which you can reach with a snowcat and hiking, but unfortunately by then the snow had been frozen, so it was crust early on and not great snow after it started melting a bit. We gave it a shot (and it was also tracked out to hell, which was surprising), and then tried the rest of the resort, but Arturo had issues with his board that had been tuned improperly and didn't dig its edge properly anymore, so we left a bit early:
nice view of the valley
Some EpicMix pictures Arturo got for us:
You can go to my Driving Through Colorado page to see pictures of Aspen and the pictures from my flight home.
After a season of no snow, I got lucky enough to have a company ski trip at Snowbird, just as fresh snow was falling, totalling about 2 feet in 2 days (not unusal for Tahoe, but a big deal in Salt Lake City).
On the first day, it was snowing hard. The weather was tough and visibility poor:
Once I got up, fresh snow was to be had :)
I got cliffed out a few times, and had to get around rocks
one of the best view moments I had that day
Day 2 was a nice bluebird day:
nice day for heli skiing :)
I took the tunnel to the other side when it opened:
Since I was about to have a company offsite in South Lake City where I had never been, I figured I'd use my Vail Season Pass and try Park City for a day. There was a bit of fresh snow, so things were decent, especially for my first snow day of 2015.
