EMSC
Well-known member
What a difference a couple of days and a few miles can make.
After getting sick on Jan 1 and skipping a couple of days most of the family had hit DIA and flown home while my parents, wife & I headed to our family's long time friends now retired just outside of Breck. A predicted overnight snow storm actually started about 8am and came down hard for a while as the 6 of us got moving and headed out. Eventually getting on-snow by 10am and skiing as a group for the morning. Just enough snow had fallen and with the overcast/light snow the rest of the day my mom was having a bit of trouble with the piles of new snow on the steeper stuff over on peak 10. So we then headed over to peak 8 and eventually 7 for some easier runs. Too flat for me I guess, as my hands got cold in a hurry and I had to pull out the heat packs (maybe in the teens to ~20F at the base, so not really all that cold out, but chilly).
After a late lunch at 1pm the wife & I struck out for the t-bar where I found quite a bit of 8"+ of fresh to ski (prob only got 4" at the base of the mtn). It was a good thing as temps late week and esp Friday had been rather warm. All of the groomed terrain down lower than that was very scrapey and rock solid underneath the new snow. Nearly all of the natural terrain that was open or in the woods, etc... on most of the hill had TONS of rocks and hidden gems. Wife & I both hit a bunch of stuff (fortunately only minor scrapes to our bases). Way less coverage and snowpack than at Steamboat. The only exception to this that I could find was much of the t-bar tree runs. Even there the top wind-swept sections had dicey areas hidden under the new snow with plenty of coverage in the trees the rest of the way down. I'd heard that the bowls were very sketchy earlier in the week and so didn't bother to try them.
Wife had a very enjoyable time on the t-bar so we did lap after lap until it closed. Then heading over to E-chair and beating the 4pm buzzer by only a minute or two and finishing to the bottom of Peak 9 around 4:15.
After getting sick on Jan 1 and skipping a couple of days most of the family had hit DIA and flown home while my parents, wife & I headed to our family's long time friends now retired just outside of Breck. A predicted overnight snow storm actually started about 8am and came down hard for a while as the 6 of us got moving and headed out. Eventually getting on-snow by 10am and skiing as a group for the morning. Just enough snow had fallen and with the overcast/light snow the rest of the day my mom was having a bit of trouble with the piles of new snow on the steeper stuff over on peak 10. So we then headed over to peak 8 and eventually 7 for some easier runs. Too flat for me I guess, as my hands got cold in a hurry and I had to pull out the heat packs (maybe in the teens to ~20F at the base, so not really all that cold out, but chilly).
After a late lunch at 1pm the wife & I struck out for the t-bar where I found quite a bit of 8"+ of fresh to ski (prob only got 4" at the base of the mtn). It was a good thing as temps late week and esp Friday had been rather warm. All of the groomed terrain down lower than that was very scrapey and rock solid underneath the new snow. Nearly all of the natural terrain that was open or in the woods, etc... on most of the hill had TONS of rocks and hidden gems. Wife & I both hit a bunch of stuff (fortunately only minor scrapes to our bases). Way less coverage and snowpack than at Steamboat. The only exception to this that I could find was much of the t-bar tree runs. Even there the top wind-swept sections had dicey areas hidden under the new snow with plenty of coverage in the trees the rest of the way down. I'd heard that the bowls were very sketchy earlier in the week and so didn't bother to try them.
Wife had a very enjoyable time on the t-bar so we did lap after lap until it closed. Then heading over to E-chair and beating the 4pm buzzer by only a minute or two and finishing to the bottom of Peak 9 around 4:15.
