Some days are better in bounds....

I recently followed a storm that hit the Vail Valley last Tuesday and Wednesday night. The video above was posted on Tuesday from Vail The storm dumped 19 inches of snow on Vail Mountain Resort by 5:30 on Wednesday morning. In April, the consistency of the snow is usually different than most of the winter and the thick wet snow is usually a nightmare for both driving and backcountry travel. Rather than going back to the Camp Hale area that we had just spent the weekend exploring, a few of my buddies decided we would go directly to the resort and have the lifts help us get where we wanted to go. This is the type of weather allows the resorts to boast expressions like, "best day of the year".

On a big spring dump day such as it was it did not make sense to either skin up a mountain or take a snowmobile into the backcountry. With almost 20 inches of new snow the best bet was to go to the resort and that is exactly what we did. The lift lines were not horrible because it was a Wednesday and most people had to work and the snow was so heavy that in most cases you needed to use someone else's track to get in or out of a run so I was happy to see other riders out there.

In addition, this would have been a severely dangerous avalanche day in the backcountry. The avalanche report for that day as shown in this link: http://avalanche.state.co.us/pub_bc_avo.php?zone_id=2 was that all north, east, and south facing slopes were very dangerous. It was also a blue bird day, so the sunny weather quickly heated up the southwest slopes rendering them virtually to thick and heavy to ski.

It is important to understand which days are best to ski where. Although backcountry travel and skiing is often the most pleasurable and prestine type of skiing, there is plenty of good fun to be had in bounds. Check out this video of my jumping of the the chair 4 cliffs at vail and then throwing a 360 iron cross off the notorious "whoppie" jump at vail. No way you would get a line like that in the backcountry.

Please excuse these halloween skiing videos as placeholders. I am having technical difficulties with the recent videos and I will upload them when they are available. Feel free to giggle at Nacho Libre as he attempts telemark skiing on Loveland Pass. Cheers.