Awhile back I posted about going to Utah versus Tahoe for President's Day week. Well, we ultimately decided to do neither once we looked at how the trips were going to pan out cost wise and given the likely snow conditions. Decided on driving up to Taos for the week with a stop at Santa Fe for a day and a half in transit. The Ms. played a role too since she didn't really want a pure ski trip at all. :-({|= We figured we'd hit New Mexico while they actually had snow given that I know there can be years down this way where there basically is no ski season. After a late arrival in Santa Fe (~1:30 AM), we headed up to the ski area on Saturday morning and first thing that struck me was what a pain in the butt the road up from Santa Fe is. Still had a lot of blowing and drifting areas from the snow the previous week, leading to some tricky spots to the say the least. Arrived up at Santa Fe around 9:15 AM given that we only budgeted maybe 30 minutes for the drive from our hotel.
Biggest thing that struck me was how uncrowded the place was for a holiday weekend. We skied all day with maybe a 2 minute wait on the main high speed quad being the worst thing we had to deal with. Snow was generally pretty consolidated, with some funky wind affected areas in the snow fields and especially in the lift 7 area. It was blowing pretty good with certain exposures on the mountain above the 11,000 foot mark or so. Lower mountain is pretty much dedicated to people learning to ski, while everything for advanced and expert skiers is on the upper mountain with three triple lifts to serve it. This helped make the place feel even less crowded. We spoke with one of the guys at Boot Doctor's in Taos Ski Valley about how thin the crowds were, and his hypothesis was that Santa Fe's business has really gone down since Taos opened the mountain to boarders.
With fresh snow, Santa Fe would probably have enough terrain to keep an expert skier interested for a couple of days. For us with the packed/hard packed conditions, one day seemed just about right to get a feel for the place. I will say that the desert vistas off of the top of the mountain are truly incredible, and probably not equaled at most places other than perhaps Arizona Snow Bowl (which I've yet to make it up to). I'll add some pictures when I get a bit more free time later this week (and get my Taos report up, heading back there for another day tomorrow).
Snowfield entrance with vista at Santa Fe:
Further down:
Biggest thing that struck me was how uncrowded the place was for a holiday weekend. We skied all day with maybe a 2 minute wait on the main high speed quad being the worst thing we had to deal with. Snow was generally pretty consolidated, with some funky wind affected areas in the snow fields and especially in the lift 7 area. It was blowing pretty good with certain exposures on the mountain above the 11,000 foot mark or so. Lower mountain is pretty much dedicated to people learning to ski, while everything for advanced and expert skiers is on the upper mountain with three triple lifts to serve it. This helped make the place feel even less crowded. We spoke with one of the guys at Boot Doctor's in Taos Ski Valley about how thin the crowds were, and his hypothesis was that Santa Fe's business has really gone down since Taos opened the mountain to boarders.
With fresh snow, Santa Fe would probably have enough terrain to keep an expert skier interested for a couple of days. For us with the packed/hard packed conditions, one day seemed just about right to get a feel for the place. I will say that the desert vistas off of the top of the mountain are truly incredible, and probably not equaled at most places other than perhaps Arizona Snow Bowl (which I've yet to make it up to). I'll add some pictures when I get a bit more free time later this week (and get my Taos report up, heading back there for another day tomorrow).
Snowfield entrance with vista at Santa Fe:
Further down:
. We did have a chance to make it down to the San Francisco de Asis Church, quite a nifty place, along with visiting the one at Taos Pueblo. Didn't happen to eat at the Mexican place down there though, but found all sorts of other interesting food. We were overall extremely surprised by the reasonableness of the restaurants and stores in the area though too.