I set out to ski every day. I didn't make that goal, but I did manage to ski 116 of the 135 days the mountain was open (the season was to be 137 days, but there were two days when the lifts were completely closed due to wind). And I managed to ski the first 107 days straight (November 26 to March 12).
I had a subsidiary goal of skiing 1.5 million vertical ft and I did make that with my season total being 1,537,544 vertical ft at a daily average of 13,255 vertical ft, although the distribution of that is quite uneven as you can see from the chart below. In particular, my daily average before Christmas was not great, mostly because so little of the mountain was open.
The statistic that really surprised me was the distance travelled. MY GPS shows me covering 2,369 miles (3,813 km). About 40% of that is the ride up on the lift, so it means I covered about 1,400 miles (2,900 km) on skis!Here's the combined track for the entire season.
As you can see, my favourite place to ski is the trees on the Priest Creek face, so here's a closer look at that.
I didn't particularly set out to improve my skiing this season, but in the end I definitely did. Time on the snow and two rounds of local's clinics (10 sessions) with Jamie certainly contributed to that despite my primary motivation going in being to meet some locals of similar ability to ski with. My bump skiing in particular improved out of sight, which would not surprise those of you who noticed how often I posted on skiing bumps.
It wasn't the greatest season in terms of snow; it looks like the season total will be around 250 inches compared to the average of 350 and the past two seasons of over 400 inches. I still got in some really great skiing despite the shortage of powder days and not one of those truly epic days when the snow is so deep that you feel transported to another world. The best day of the season was probably February 26, followed by New Years Eve. December 31 actually had more snow, but the lack of a base made skiing the trees that day a bad idea.
1 comment:
I started following your blog because of the topic of skiing. I used to live in Leadville and would have to say, there isn't anything like Colorado powder.
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