EMSC
Well-known member
Our fearless leaders plan was to keep the drives ever shorter as the trip went on for the Durango Based trip. The obvious answer for day 3 for the main crew was Purgatory, being only 30min away.
At some point a decision was made to narrow down to two cars from 3 given the weekend and prime parking for HOV 4+ at Purgatory. Unfortunately that meant a forgotten helmet 10 min into the drive, turn around and then back up the road, squeaking into the HOV lot ~10 minutes before it was full. the advanced group was figuring a day of cruisers given the trail map and that's a big part of what occurred, but there were some surprises for us.
Firstly, the terrain is a bit benchy on many lifts like Wolf Creek, though the benches have more pitch to them making them far less annoying. Also there are TONS of various rollovers, pitches and etc... making the terrain more interesting than anticipated. There are even a handful of spots with decent pitch once you look closely at the map.
To be sure the lowest portion of the hill on Steeps was a bit thin, but not really any more so than say, very bottom of Plunge in Telluride. We pretty much spent the whole day on the Backside. Hermos Park was mostly rolling short pitches with confusing cross cross, get lost options. I though the terrain served by the ancient old center pole Grizzly double was some of the more consistently pitched terrain on the backside. The exception to that is above the Grizzly 'mid' station. It is completely flat above the mid-station on that old double. Not even sure why they ran it so many towers further along. With Legends lift area being a decent pitch followed by basically low angle blue until the bottom few hundred verts pitched down pretty steeply. I only put one run into the GPS watch just to measure speed coming off the bottom pitch which was groomed and with a wide open flat valley at the bottom you could ignore turns on the bottom hundred or so verts... The answer for my late afternoon run was only 48.3MPH max speed. But then, I wasn't pushing it at all either. So the general public was probably hitting roughly that speed too.
It was mostly sunny and plenty warm enough to fully transition parts of the East facing frontside (lower half-ish). Also flat areas, but not really much change to snow on most of the hill which faces North.
Small multi-story base area. Too small for much, but a few retail stores in there.
You don't see many center Pole doubles anymore. Purgatory has two of them. Grizzly lift here.
The whole group kept referring to this as Dante's Inferno all day long.
Surprising amount of Spanish Moss in the higher elevation trees.
Moss-tache?
Very modernistic glass cab on the back of this sight seeing tour cat.
I found two of these built in the woods. I still can't figure if they are for MTB or Snowboards.
The backside valley where 3 lift bases are is nearly pan flat.
Thumbs up to McCormacks Maze glade. Very wide and long (far right of trail map).
top of Legends lift. The short Paul's Park glade lookers left is good as well.
Always nice to end the day with sun, band and drink...
At some point a decision was made to narrow down to two cars from 3 given the weekend and prime parking for HOV 4+ at Purgatory. Unfortunately that meant a forgotten helmet 10 min into the drive, turn around and then back up the road, squeaking into the HOV lot ~10 minutes before it was full. the advanced group was figuring a day of cruisers given the trail map and that's a big part of what occurred, but there were some surprises for us.
Firstly, the terrain is a bit benchy on many lifts like Wolf Creek, though the benches have more pitch to them making them far less annoying. Also there are TONS of various rollovers, pitches and etc... making the terrain more interesting than anticipated. There are even a handful of spots with decent pitch once you look closely at the map.
To be sure the lowest portion of the hill on Steeps was a bit thin, but not really any more so than say, very bottom of Plunge in Telluride. We pretty much spent the whole day on the Backside. Hermos Park was mostly rolling short pitches with confusing cross cross, get lost options. I though the terrain served by the ancient old center pole Grizzly double was some of the more consistently pitched terrain on the backside. The exception to that is above the Grizzly 'mid' station. It is completely flat above the mid-station on that old double. Not even sure why they ran it so many towers further along. With Legends lift area being a decent pitch followed by basically low angle blue until the bottom few hundred verts pitched down pretty steeply. I only put one run into the GPS watch just to measure speed coming off the bottom pitch which was groomed and with a wide open flat valley at the bottom you could ignore turns on the bottom hundred or so verts... The answer for my late afternoon run was only 48.3MPH max speed. But then, I wasn't pushing it at all either. So the general public was probably hitting roughly that speed too.
It was mostly sunny and plenty warm enough to fully transition parts of the East facing frontside (lower half-ish). Also flat areas, but not really much change to snow on most of the hill which faces North.
Small multi-story base area. Too small for much, but a few retail stores in there.
You don't see many center Pole doubles anymore. Purgatory has two of them. Grizzly lift here.
The whole group kept referring to this as Dante's Inferno all day long.
Surprising amount of Spanish Moss in the higher elevation trees.
Moss-tache?
Very modernistic glass cab on the back of this sight seeing tour cat.
I found two of these built in the woods. I still can't figure if they are for MTB or Snowboards.
The backside valley where 3 lift bases are is nearly pan flat.
Thumbs up to McCormacks Maze glade. Very wide and long (far right of trail map).
top of Legends lift. The short Paul's Park glade lookers left is good as well.
Always nice to end the day with sun, band and drink...
