Heading out to Colorado in a few weeks - planning to spend a day at Breckenridge and then continuing on to ski for a few days at Vail and Beaver Creek (staying in Avon). I haven't been out there to ski before - any recommendations on where the best conditions will be found this season, or fun apres ski and nightlife spots?
My wife and I are both aggressive skiers and will be looking to see as much challenging terrain as we can for the first 2 days - after that we are linking up with some friends who will be more content to stick to cruisers.
Zosoxfan has way more experience than I do, but I'll add my take on Vail and Beaver as I've spent some time there recently and I
love glades
. If you want moguls or chutes, I'm not your guy, but if you like in-bounds stuff with trees I have plenty of tips.
Vail
First off, my favorite runs at Vail are:
- Shangri-La Glade (stay skier's left along the ridge for a while, don't drop down too early and try not to cross the lift line)
- WFO (former off-trail powder stash)
- Champagne Glade (on the Earl's side of Blue Sky Basin)
- Hornsilver (on the Pete's side of Blue Sky Basin) - look for an extension off of The Star that's not on the map, signed as "Silver Star"
My days at Vail usually start with: (1) Gondola to (3) Wildwood, to get to the top of the ridge. I'll then take a warmup run down to Game Creek, since there's never a line there. I avoid the front-side trails at all costs because that's where the skiing traffic mayhem is - for whatever reason, there's some popular belief that the back bowls are all experts-only terrain so a lot of people stay away out of fear. They're wrong, but that's to our benefit.
After that warmup run, I'll usually do my one-and-only Sundown Bowl run of the day, because getting back to it is such a pain in the butt. You start down the ridgeline where you can turn into either Game Creek (on skier's right) or Sundown (on skier's left) and just keep going straight. There's a slight left to turn off onto Ptarmigan Ridge, which is a long traverse to get around to the stuff on Sundown. With minimal pole-ing you can get a long long way out there and usually end up on a huge snowfield making fresh tracks. This will be Seldom, or Never - if you get to a point that's basically flat where you're worried about running out of momentum, that's "O.S.". Anyway, head down your fall line and eventually you'll come to some groves of trees. Those will have some gorgeous powder in them, some are aggressively steep but you get some great turns in. Generally bias your run towards your right, because going straight left will put you onto the long catwalk run-out to Lift 5. You'll end up there anyway, but biasing right will prolong your run.
Take High Noon lift (#5) and from there I generally start just doing a run on each bowl, heading from left to right of the Back Bowls map. Do a run down to the Sun Up lift (#9). Do a Tea Cup Glades or other run down to Tea Cup Lift, or skip it and head down China Bowl to the Orient Express lift (#21). Do a Shangri-La run (or two, if you like it as much as I do), and then commit yourself to a Mongolia run, which involves taking the poma lift (#22) all the way out there. The farther out you go in Mongolia, the more untracked everything will be, but the shorter and less-steep the run, and the longer the run-back on the traverse will be.
Once you're satisfied with your quick tour of the back bowls, ski your run-out down to Lift #37 to head to the Blue Sky Basin. Try a bunch of different things in that area, if you like them you can stay on them all day really. Cloud 9 / Big Rock Park will be crowded but little else will be. The stuff under the #37 lift line, or visible from it, is often very mogul-y and might be icy, but the rest should be glorious. Pete's Lift (#39) closes at 2:15, Lift 37 closes at 2:30, and so that time will start a stampede to the Tea Cup lift (#36) to get out of there. My advice is to leave the Blue Sky area by 1:30-1:45 so that you miss that mad rush and have time for more runs rather than standing in lift lines.
The back bowls close at 3:00, but if you jump in to anything that runs out to High Noon (#5) they'll look past that until about 3:30, because they'll sometimes steer people that way to alleviate overcrowding on the main way down from Tea Cup Lift.
The last few runs of the day you'll need to do on the Front Side, a lot of which can be rather skied-off and icy, not to mention populated by beginners and out-of-control teenagers. What's worth doing are a few runs on the Northwoods lift (see Hairbag Alley on skier's right - it's a narrow canyon channel that usually piles up the powder), and stuff accessible from the Avanti lift (#2). I've found some great powder stashes if you go along the ridge map-right of the top of Avanti and try the trees on either side of Pickeroon or Berries. What you want to avoid are the long, slow runs down the mountain that everyone gets merged into: (A) the traverses from the bottom of #11 Northwoods to the bottom of Vail Village, and (B) the equivalent run, Gitalong Road, from Mid-Vail to the bottom. Some of that will keep you occupied until last chair at 3:30, after which point you can take the gondola down from mid-vail if you want (down-loads run till 4:00), or just pick some route home if accessible.
Beaver Creek
I've only spent a few days here but skied just about every black or glade run (a claim I can't make about Vail despite way more time there - good christ that place is huge). My picks are:
- The Grouse Mountain lift has most of the double-black stuff, which is steep but little of it is truly extreme or dangerous.
- However, for my money, the very best trail on the mountain is the Royal Elk Glade. Just absolute boatloads of powder over there, enough that you have to worry about tree wells (so bring a friend). It flows into Black Bear glade, the connections can be nebulous but it's a huge region that definitely deserves a few runs if they don't exhaust you.
- The Larkspur bowl, if it has some snow on it, can be the source of some great runs even if not particularly challenging for an expert. It just holds powder very well. The black runs to the left as you go off the lift are mostly moguls, but the trees in between them can be tasty.
- If you traverse from Larkspur over to the Bachelor Gulch area, Thresher Glade was my second-favorite run at BC. Most terrain on that side of the mountain is green/blue stuff, but the runs off of Strawberry lift #12 will be very lightly populated so you might enjoy some time there.
- The Stone Creek chutes (from the summit, off to skier's right, far left side of the map) emptying into Rose Bowl are reputedly the craziest stuff on the mountain. Some friends of mine did it and loved it, but from their description it would have been a little much for me to handle safely.
Give a thought to doing a day at
Copper Mountain, too. It's not on the Epic Pass, so it's much more of a locals mountain, but I found at least 3 runs that were the equal of anything at Vail/BC. The best reason to go is that there is free cat skiing (!) 10a-1:30p on Friday-Sunday. The cat-accessed area is incredible, especially with a snowfall.