Sunday, November 30, 2008

Powder Day

I went skiing for the first time in almost three years yesterday. A daunting prospect, for a variety of reasons. Not having skied for several years is bad enough, but it was only the third time I'd tele skied period. And there's the small fact of one shoulder surgery and a broken ankle between those first two times skiing and this time, and I was a little nervous.

Turned out ok though. Granted, I'm still not very good at Tele skiing, but I'm getting better, and it didn't go as badly as it could have.

The main story of the day, however, was the trip to and from A-Basin. It was snowing the entire day. On the way up, traffic was about as expected: moving slowly as we got closer to the pass and the Eisenhower tunnels. But near the top, people were sliding all over the place. In our little Subaru (more than capable in most conditions) a tap of the accelerator had the back swinging out. That's hard to do with an AWD car with snow tires.

But we got to the hill no problem. After 3 or so hours of skiing and standing in lift lines (most people stuck to the bottom, with good reason. It was about 10-15 degrees at the top with a 20-40 mph wind to make things yet more interesting.) we decided to head back to Boulder.

Good luck.

Past Keystone, it was bumper to bumper traffic all the way up I-70 to the tunnels. We left the mountain at 2:30, or a little before. It was after 7:00 by the time we got through the tunnels. And once we did, we got to deal with whiteout conditions. If we were wondering why traffic was moving so slowly, we quickly figured it out.

All in all, we spent 10 hours driving, and about 3 on the mountain. Not a great ratio, but it was still fun, and I'm looking forward to Aspen next weekend.

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