Phew, big week and a half for me. Just got back from a 3 day trip to Silverton, Telluride, and Aspen. Silverton was doing the $50 heli drops over the weekend for the last weekend of unguided skiing until April (ish). I’d never been to the mountain before and the $50 promo was a good enough incentive for me to make the trip. In addition to the $50 per heli drop you also had a buy a lift ticket for $49 (plus a 1$ road tax fee).
For the $100 I got in 3 lift served runs and one heli run. The conditions were pretty terrible, but I went into it knowing everything was going to be skied off and icy. It’s tough to put into words just how skied off and icy it was. I couldn’t have imagined riding much of the mountain on a rocker snowboard without magne traction(even a ‘rocker-camber’ board like a Never Summer). I was on a Jones Flagship 158 I recently found at the REI Denver garage sale over new years for $210. I’m still dealing with broken laces on my 3 season old Salomon Malamute boots (one inner lace, one outer lace). So I rode on 6 season old Burton Shaun Whites, not the best conditions for a packed out park boot.
The mountain was awesome. Going to be going back for sure. I had a lot of fun on the 4 runs. It’s not often, especially this early in the season, you can find runs with exposure and no fall zones – especially lift accessed terrain. The day really made me wish I had an ice axe. Runs we rode -
We spent another night in Ouray and headed to Telluride the next morning. I’d never been to Telluride either and this place was great. They had reported 2″ overnight, some areas definently held more. The hike to Bald Mountain wasn’t too bad and we got 2-3′ of new snow. The winds were HONKING!
Headed to Aspen monday night and stayed at the hostel in Glenwood Springs. I’d stayed there by myself about a year ago and got one of the private rooms for $25. They didn’t have any doubles or family rooms (up to 5 people) available so we paid $16 each for a bed in the big open room. I think there were about 10 other people sleeping in the room but it was hard to tell because people were getting up and coming and going all night. For $16 we both felt kind of ripped off. It’d be worth it if you were on a trip on your own, but if traveling with others splitting a motel would be worth the extra.
Skied Highlands on tuesday. Good stuff, few feet in some areas. They opened the bowl around noon but neither of us hiked it. I had a to get back to Boulder for work tuesday night.
Wednesday and thursday nights were the classroom portions for an Avalanche 1 course. I didn’t feel like I walked away with too much new knowledge. I had previously taken a “free” (donation) FOBP course and have been travelling with experienced backcountry skiers for 5 seasons now. The on-snow portion of the class was sat/sun and the beacon work was great. It really helped having someone show me how to actually use the beacon for fine searching.
Lift evac training I took part in a month or so ago-
Heading to Crested Butte early next week!
