Breckenridge - Day 5

Wednesday, December 29, 2010:

Today was our final day of this great ski trip. During so much of this trip, we have been blessed with great weather. Today, however, the weather did not cooperate. It was an overcast day and it was cold. It was also windy and there was snow falling at the top of the mountain, which caused us to change some of our plans. We had been thinking that we would try one of the highest (expert) areas of Peak 9 today, and Chad and Chris were hoping to try one of the bowls, but the highest lifts on the mountain were closed because of the high winds and low visibility.

So we contented ourselves with traversing the different peaks and revisiting some of the trails we had enjoyed most earlier in the week. This included one of the terrain parks where Chad and Chris tried out some of the jumps. We were able to cover a lot of terrain, but we were definitely slowed down today by the crowds. As the New Year's Eve weekend approached, the resort was getting more and more crowded. We found ourselves waiting in several long lift lines today.

Given the crowds and the cold, windy conditions, we decided to ski through the lunch hour but call it a day in the early afternoon. It was a good last day, but definitely not the best skiing day this week.

On this our last day in Breckenridge, we enjoyed a late lunch at the Breckenridge Brewery and a great dinner at a restaurant called Embers. Both of these restaurants had been recommended by a friend, and the recommendations were excellent ones. We ended our vacation having been very well fed.

Our Day at Vail

Tuesday, December 28, 2010:

Today was a beautiful day. Not only was it a clear, beautiful, blue sky day, but we were surrounded by some gorgeous Colorado countryside. We got up early to make the 45 minute drive to Vail. Today was our day to explore a new mountain resort.

We arrive at Vail before the lifts even opened. So we had plenty of time to adjust our equipment and, as soon as the lifts were ready for passengers, we were in line. With Chad as our guide (once again), we managed to get the most out of this mountain. We were also joined this day by Chad's girlfriend, Cara.

Vail is a huge resort. It is comprised of several mountains and a series of "bowls." And we covered most of it. We started on the eastern face of one of the mountains and tried out several of Chad's favorite runs. They were marked as intermediate trails, but on just about any other mountain, they would be considered advanced-intermediate. They were wide, but they had a serious pitch to them. And we flew down. The conditions were excellent - a combination of fully groomed slopes and several inches of fresh powder.

After our warm up period, Chad then proceeded to lead us all over the resort. We hardly took the same lift twice as we traversed from mountain to mountain and slope to slope. Our goal was to get to one of Annette's the bowls -- called "Blue Sky Bowl." A bowl is a wide open expanse of slope that has very few trees on it. There are no real trails. You basically ski anywhere. And the pitch of the slope can be relatively steep. It is a very unique skiing experience.

We skied a really full day at Vail. We took a mid-morning break (which was helpful for those of us with chilled toes) and a lunch break, but otherwise we skied pretty hard and we were exiting the mountain just about the time the lifts were starting to close -- which was between 3:00 and 3:30pm. What a great day.

I had never skied Vail before, and I fell in love with this resort. I definitely need to go back -- soon!

Breckenridge - Day 3

Monday, December 27, 2010:

Our third day in Breckenridge was our second day on the slopes. We now had our ski legs, and so we decided to head to Peak 10 and take on some of the black diamond slopes. They weren't bad at all. In fact, they were a nice challenge, but we managed them quite well.

This was a colder day than the previous day -- in part because the sun did not shine much this day. But we still got in a very full day of skiing. We also had fun this day taking turns taking pictures of ourselves skiing down the mountain.

Chad provided us with an interesting way to track how much skiing we were doing. He has a season's pass to Vail and the surrounding ski resorts and there is a computer chip buried in his ski pass which is tracked as he travels across the slopes. This chip works much like the "easy passes" on state toll roads. There is a monitoring device at each ski lift that electronically senses and records Chad's ski pass every time he boards a lift. At the end of each day, Chad was able to log onto one of the resort sites and get a report on how many vertical feet he traveled that day based on the lifts he rode. Based on these reports, we had some very concrete proof of the considerable distances we were covering each day.

On Sunday, we covered 17,625 vertical feet. On Monday, we exceeded that figure by almost 2,000 - covering 19,541 vertical feet. On our third day of skiing (Tuesday) - which we spent at Vail - we skied the greatest distance -- 20,695 vertical feet. And on our fourth day -- which was only a half-day for us -- we skied 11,880 vertical feet. All tolled, in our three and a half days, we covered 69,741 vertical feet. That's a lot!