Skiing Breckenridge

This morning I played a bit of hooky and got some runs in at Breckenridge, Colorado. I moved from Atlanta to lovely Summit County in March for a job and have been enjoying all that the Rockies have to offer, from hiking 14ers to braving today’s subzero temperatures to get some powder. We’ve been lucky to have a lot of snow for the season so far; although I wasn’t here last season, I heard that skiing this time last year was not good. It’s been snowing like crazy and well below freezing this week as an arctic blast pummeled the area and brought over a foot of snow in the past few days. The base at Breck is up to 36 inches and with all the new snow and a sunny forecast for the morning, it seemed like a perfect day to get a few hours in before work and beat the Denver crowd coming in for the weekend.

It was well below zero when my friend Tom and I got to the Beaver Run Superchair for our first run at 9am. As we were buckling in, I noticed a brown river flowing towards the chairlift. At the top of the river was a small geyser that was quickly growing. A waterline had frozen and burst and soon was spewing freezing, brown water over a hundred feet into the air. We decided to take a different chair. We took a few blue groomers to warm up (it was numbingly cold) and saw a lot of the people with the Hartford Ski Spectacular, an adaptive ski group going on right now at Breck. The Hartford Ski Spectacular is one of the nation's largest winter sports festivals for people with disabilities and we saw people on ski-bikes, mono-skis, and outriggers. Very cool.

My friend Tom the Aussie is hands-down the best skier I’ve ever skied with. He suggested we take the T-Bar lift up to the Horseshoe Bowl and ski a double black diamond. Two problems here: One, I haven’t taken a t-bar lift since I was probably six years old. Two, is that I have never skied a double black diamond. After some encouragement from Tom, I agreed, and crossed my fingers that I wouldn’t break anything this early in the season. Ironically, the T-Bar presented more problems than skiing the bowl. We caught the bar with minimal problems and Tom proceeded to tell me how they heckle the poor fools who fall off the bar when he skis in New Zealand. Not two minutes later, my skis hit a groove in the snow and I took us both off the bar. Since Tom’s a good sport, he laughed it off, but I can only imagine the hell he would have put me through if we weren’t friends. We skied back down to the lift and he suggested I take the bar alone this time.

The Horseshoe Bowl was challenging and fun. The snow was great and I only saw one other person. I definitely need to work on my mogul skiing and build some confidence on terrain that steep, but it was exhilarating. Despite the cold, I was sweating at the bottom. They have been doing some major avalanche mitigation and we could hear the avalanche air cannons going off continuously near Peak 6, the new terrain that will open this season. Between the skiing and the constant booming from the cannons, we decided we had our fill for the morning and we both left for work. The forecast calls for more snow this weekend, so we all are hoping for some more powder days in the near future.

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