Snowmass Skiing

Well, I'm making good on my promise of more pictures. These are just a few of the many I took, but they capture some of the key moments.

This is the four of us at my cousin Michelle's favorite picture taking location. You can see Garden of the Gods and Pike's Peak in the background. I think this one turned out quite nice. This is on the way up to Snowmass.

So, you walked out the door our our condo and this is what you found. Ski in, ski out access. Nice green run here to start and end the day. Look at that nice sunny weather!

At the top of the blue section, you found this view. Those are the Maroon Bells in the background. Aren't they lovely? Again, lovely sunny day. It was about 45 degrees when I took this picture. So nice.

Last run of the day Michelle, Amanda and I decided to do a hike-to blue run called Long Shot. You got to it by hiking up higher from the top of the chairlift that provided the view in the picture above. The hike was labeled "short, but strenuous". No lie. So after hiking, and then sucking air for a bit, and then taking pictures, we started down. Itw as 3.4 miles of tree skiing, powder, or packed powder (no grooming back here folks), and bumps. Even moguls. Here I am, happy to have made it 1/2 way down. (It got harder from this sign on...the smile turned into an 'oh shit' look for a while).

So, I lied above. Long shot wasn't technically last run of the day, because we were way on the other side of the mountain and had to ski back. We couldn't make it back to our ski in/out access point in one run, so we had to go halfway up the Village Express lift and come down one last time. We decided to pretend that one of us was a child so we could go through the family and kids zone and along the way we found these reindeer hanging out. My guess was they are vastly amused by the two legged, funny looking human beings throwing themselves down the hill on sticks. They were very curious, and if you came up to their fence, they came to say hi. We snapped a photo and then finished the little run down the the condo to take off our skies one last time.

It was a great trip, I can't wait to get skiing out in the mountains again. After that, anything around the midwest is going to be disappointing in its brevity.