Farewell to the 2011-2012 Ski Season
In 2011, I experienced the best ski season of my life. On the Thursday after ski season ended last year, I wrote:
For next year, I think I'll keep my goal at 30 days. If everything works out as planned, we'll have a place in the mountains this fall and it'll be a bit easier to hit the slopes without sitting in traffic.
Everything did work out as planned and we found ourselves in eager anticipation of ski season last fall. We prepped the Ski Shack for lots of visitors by getting queen-sized bunk beds made for the kids. We even got a hot tub installed for Trish's birthday in mid-December.
For Christmas, my parents, sister and her wife all flew in and we spent a beautiful evening watching the parade at Winter Park.
The skiing still wasn't great, but there was enough snow to cover the tubing hills in Fraser. We got some sweet helmet covers from my Mom for Christmas and had a blast with Trish's brother's family over New Years.
The rest of the season was filled with a lot of 4-run outings, where we skied the bare minimum to count it as a day. I can recall only 3 really good days. One was at Steamboat with 11" of powder and lots of knee-deep stashes. The others were at Mary Jane where Trish and I got fresh powder tracks for a good hour.
Yep, the snow was terrible this year. In fact, my favorite lift at Winter Park (Eagle Wind) never even opened. I still managed to get in 33 days, but it certainly wasn't a ski season to reminisce about. I am proud of the fact that Abbie and Jack skied 15 days and never needed a lesson. Trish even taught them how to snowboard one day and they both loved it.
We only made it to 3 resorts this year, a far cry from last year's 9 + a hut trip. However, I don't feel like we missed out because the snow was so bad. Having a condo 15 minutes from the resort certainly helped us get more days in, but I'm willing to bet we skied 10x more hours last year.
Next year, I hope it snows a ton and we get 50 days in. In the meantime, I'm pumped that mountain bike season has started and there's lots of dry trails along the front range. I have two rides in so far this week and hope to get at least 30 days in this summer. With 600 miles of trails just minutes from our Ski Shack, it seems like it should be easy enough.
In other life-related news, I'm driving to Colorado Springs this afternoon to pick out the interior for The Bus. With any luck, MotorWorks Restorations will have it done in a couple months. In the meantime, you can see their latest progress on Facebook. I can't wait until this bad boy is road worthy! 