Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Three Days, Three Resorts? No problem!

This past weekend the BF and I embarked on a trip over Vail Pass to ski three awesome Summit County resorts:  Copper Mountain, Arapahoe (A) Basin, and Breckenridge.  Three days of skiing?  No problem!  That's why you make sure to fortify yourself with lots of meat and beer.  (Hence the reason I haven't eaten meat since Sunday afternoon).

       
Top of the Sierra Lift, Copper Mountain




                       
On Friday morning, we left Glenwood Springs (our half-way point Thursday evening) around 8:00 and headed to Copper Mountain.  We got a really good deal on lift tickets from Liftopia.  It hadn't snowed in a while, and it was super windy on top, so the snow conditions could have been better.  Still, after a steep, extremely bumpy run on Far East, we settled into a nice groove of blue groomers for the rest of the day.  I highly recommend checking out Jack's bar for lunch.  It's at the bottom of the American Eagle lift and it's almost like a food court inside.  Everything from gyros to curry to brats!

View from the Montezuma Bowl at A-Basin.  Keystone resort is in the background
Saturday was spent at A-Basin.  This is a super old resort, and I really wish I'd gotten a picture of the AFrame building at the base.  The crazy thing about A-Basin is that the whole top-half of the mountain is above treeline.  It's an odd experience for someone who's used to looking for runs between sets of trees.  Skiing there was trying for me at first, because I just couldn't get over this weird anxiety that I had at being so high up.  Perhaps it was a little altitude issue as well.  Who knows?  We spent some time on some blues from the L lift (I can't remember the whole name) and then headed into the Montezuma Bowl.  THAT was super cool.  By the end, I was a happy girl!






We spent our last day skiing six inches of new snow at Breckenridge.  We have friends who live close to there and ski there quite often, so we had a guide.  Our buddy A took us over into the Contest Bowl for a few runs.  MAN was it steep!
Me skiing the contest bowl
We then skied a few runs off of Peak 10 before picking up the Four O'Clock run and heading into town to the car.  What a great weekend!  I highly recommend Breck for people new to skiing or who don't get to ski very often.  It's got a lot of good intermediate terrain.