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David O. Williams
Headline RSS FeedSloppy storm dumps on Colorado ski country
October 14, 2007 —
A wet fall storm slopped through town Saturday night into Sunday, Oct. 14, dropping a little over 6 inches on Vail Mountain and Beaver Creek by noon Sunday, and freaking me out about the possibility of a rainout Sunday night for Game 3 of the National League Championship Series.
My wife and I have tix to the 6:30 MST start at Coors Field, which pits the Colorado Rockies against the suddenly trash-talking Arizona Diamondbacks. The D-Backs’ Eric Byrnes, a former Rockie who does ridiculous tumbles after throwing the ball in from the outfield, said the Rocks did not outplay his squad despite Colorado winning the first two in Phoenix. Huh?
Now the Kid Rocks need only two more wins in the next five games to advance to their first World Series, where until last night they looked like a lock to play the Boston Red Sox. But the Sox were pounded in extra innings, sending local Red Sox fans (and there seems to be a lot of them) into a depressed tailspin. I still think it’ll be a Rox-Sox Series.
In the meantime, hope the weather clears enough tonight and tomorrow for the TBS (Totally Bad Station) cameras to capture all the fresh snow in the mountains and get people psyched about the coming ski season. In the past, reservation phones have rung off the hook during snowy Broncos games, and hopefully the Arapahoe Basin (only area currently open) marketing folks are shipping off tons of B-roll footage to TBS.
The Basin reported 6 new Sunday morning, and Breck and Keystone each reported more than 7 inches as of 10 a.m. Both Summit County resorts open in less than a month: Nov. 9. Look for Loveland and Copper Mountain to open in the next week or so (keep checking our snow report).
The central Colorado mountains are under a winter snow advisory until 6 p.m., Sunday, and the forecast calls for snow through Monday afternoon, with another storm predicted for the end of the week.
Snowmaking operations are set to kick off Sunday evening at Keystone, with Breckenridge firing up its guns at the end of the week. Vail opens Friday, Nov. 16, and Beaver Creek opens Wednesday, Nov. 21.
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David O. Williams
Spring skiing in the fall
October 10, 2007 —
ARAPAHOE BASIN, Colo. – Day 1.
My 2007-08 ski season began much the way it ended last May: I dropped off my middle son, Max, who was wearing shorts, at daycare after first answering his barrage of questions about why I was wearing ski clothes and why he was partially buried under all my ski gear in the back seat.
He seemed only marginally satisfied with my answer, which was that I was skiing at an unusual time of year (in this case only 20 days into fall) because I could - because the lifts had started running and there was some type of slushy substance resembling snow stuck to the side of Arapahoe Basin, where I ended my 2006-07 season only about 150 days ago in early May.
But at four years of age, Max is only marginally satisfied with a great many things in life, and I could almost see the thought forming in his mind: why did I get to ski while he had to go to school? I hurried him in the door and got back on the road.
There is something magical about Opening Day. Not baseball magical, with the sights and smells of spring in the air, but skiing magical, with a long winter and lots of powder days looming on the gray horizon. Only it was spring skiing in October at the Basin Wednesday, with sunny skies and temps topping out in the low 60s, even at 12,000 feet.
When I arrived at 10:30 a.m., a mob of snowboarders was already hanging out on the Basin’s legendary Beach (essentially where the parking lot meets the mountain), grilling burgers, shooting off firecrackers and drinking Bud longnecks. Definitely more of a Fourth of July vibe, which is another unlikely date I once skied the Basin.
A pretty sizeable crowd was jockeying to get on the Exhibition triple lift for the chance at a minute and a half of glory on the 800 vertical feet of the High Noon run covered by about 18 inches of mostly manmade slush. The lift lines were about 15 minutes long.
I got on my first chair of the season with two other singles - Chris Cain of Littleton, a U.S. Marine just back from Iraq, and Marty Killory of Frisco, a retired Vietnam vet, among many other past occupations.
“Some of my buddies are still over there (in Iraq) so I figured I’d better be able to write an email and gloat and say, ‘Hey, I went skiing today,” said Cain, who noted that despite the 62-degree temps at the Basin it was still 60 degrees cooler than Baghdad. “It’s great to be out. I figured I was going to miss the first rifle elk season so I might as well do something today.”
Cain said his four runs to that point had been “pretty wet,” but as a lifelong skier he wasn’t complaining about being able to ski a full three weeks before Halloween.
“I saw the Summit (County) paper and read there was going to be an 18-inch base on the white line of death, so instead of going swimming I took my mountain bike to my storage unit and picked up my skis …,” said Killory, who added he then rode to a bus stop, threw his bike and skis on the Summit Stage, rode that to the end of the line in Keystone and hitchhiked the rest of the way up to A-Basin.
“I love to ski and I like to climb, so I guess you can say it was just a whim and the novelty of it and just doing something different for a day,” Killory said. “But this is my third run and, surprisingly, I’m getting my ski legs right back.”
I proceeded to ski three quick and relatively uncrowded runs (A- Basin officials were expecting about 1,500 “snow” riders Wednesday) then bailed back over Vail Pass. It was short but sweet and well worth the drive.
Wednesday marked the earliest ever opening in the 61-year history of A-Basin and won The Legend first-to-open honors in the U.S. this season.
“Being the first to open two years running, we’re picking up where we left off last season, setting record skier numbers for our resort and providing the longest winter season in Colorado with 243 consecutive days of skiing and riding,” A-Basin general manager and COO Alan Henceroth said.
With a storm headed our way Sunday, just in time for the Colorado Rockies first home game in the National League Championship Series, look for more resorts to come on line soon – most likely Loveland ski area, followed soon thereafter by Copper Mountain. Vail opens Nov. 16.
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Courtesy of Silverton Mountain www.silvertonmountain.com
The Legend of the fall: A-Basin wins race to open first
October 9, 2007 —
And the winner is … Arapahoe Basin.
The first ski resort to open to the skiing masses in Colorado this season – and in fact the nation - is A-Basin, which cranks up the lifts at 9 a.m., Wednesday, Oct. 10.
A-Basin wins skiing’s equivalent of the Cold War arms race for marketing play by beating out Loveland ski area for the second straight year.
A-Basin just clipped Loveland at the tape last season when it opened Oct. 13, but Loveland has the record for the earliest opening – Oct. 6, 1985. Oct. 10, however, marks the earliest ever opening day in the 61-year history of A-Basin, aka The Legend.
A-Basin’s Exhibition Chair will serve the intermediate High Noon run and some features in the High Divide terrain park, both boasting an 18-inch, presumably packed base, consisting of a lot of manmade snow. There will be no beginner terrain open.
It’s an auspicious start to the season for the Summit County resort high on the Continental Divide, because sometime in late December A-Basin will introduce Montezuma Bowl, 400 acres of lift-served groomed runs, glades, chutes and wide-open bowl skiing off the back side of the mountain.
Opening day adult lift tickets are $45, youth tickets for ages 15-19 are $39, and children’s tickets, ages 6-14, are $22. Ski and snowboard rentals and food and beverages will be available in the A-Frame, and the 6th Alley bar and retail shop will be open to the public as well, although there will be no ski school lessons until November.
Go to www.arapahoebasin.com for more info and keep checking out our Colorado Snow Report in the left column of our site for more opening dates.
This achieves my dream of ski season kicking off while baseball is still being played in Denver. I’m headed to the Colorado Rockies first National League Championship Series home game (Game 3 in the series) on Sunday, Oct. 14, and a cold front moving through that day could dust the high peaks for the national TV cameras.
Speaking of snow sports imagery whetting the appetites of the skiing and riding public, the photo with this blog is not a preview of conditions at A-Basin (sorry for the psyche) but is instead of actual shredding that occurred last weekend at Silverton Mountain in Southwest Colorado.
Nearly a foot of snow fell on Silverton overnight Saturday, Oct. 6, so the mountain ops crews headed up for some turns Sunday on the expert-only and arguably most intense terrain in the state (although the Basin gives it a run for its money closer to Denver once more snow falls).
Silverton doesn’t open until Dec. 1 and most of the new snow fell above 12,000 feet, but Silverton is the highest ski area in North America with runs as high as 13,487, so some of the white stuff that dropped will be around until the spring. Go to www.silvertonmountain.com for more info and to check this place out. It is a unique and crazed high-alpine ski experience.
Closer to home, Vail opens Nov. 16 and Beaver Creek cranks it up Nov. 21. We’re only a little more than a month away and increasingly pumped for what promises to be a big La Nina season (or not … it’s hard to predict these things).
Now, some housecleaning. Kurt Desautels currently of the Colorado Tennis Association and formerly a RealVail local, was in town long enough the other day to bag on my blog in which I compared tennis to polo in, I think, a lame attempt to plead for the ongoing relevancy of our sport and fight the misperception that it’s an elitist endeavor. You’re right, Kurt, tennis is a true sport, where the humans are the athletes, not horses.
Kurt had a better slam when he questioned what kind of RealVail local would call the old Chair 10 at Vail a triple, and I have to say that was simply a typo. I all-to-well remember the bar in the middle and won’t miss the endless ride to the top of Highline.
Finally, there was one more Vail Town Council candidate who threw his hat (and petition) in the ring by the 5 p.m. deadline Friday. East Vail’s Robert Schilling got in under the wire to make it a total of 11 candidates for five council seats, but then he reportedly changed his mind and withdrew on Monday, thereby setting the official record for the shortest council campaign in Vail history. Thanks for at least thinking about it, Robert.
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David O. Williams
Bringing real locals back into Vail
October 6, 2007 —
My wife and I in July did something almost no one in the Vail Valley does these days: we moved back to Vail.
It’s considered a fairly radical move in town where median home prices over the past decade have soared far out of the reach of most working-class locals.
But Kristin and I met in the early 90s while we were both living and working in Vail, and it’s been a longstanding dream of ours to somehow make it back to town.
Needless to say, this move raised some eyebrows amongst our friends and family, eliciting reactions ranging from, “Who will your kids play with in that gated Disneyland?” to “You could buy a brand-new house that’s twice the size in Eagle for that kind of money.”
The simple answer to both of those statements is, “You’d be surprised how many kids there are in Vail still,” and “If we’re going to go through all the hassles of living in a ski town, we want to actually live in a ski town.”
No knock on Eagle, which is a fine old ranching town now inhabited by everyone who used to live in Vail and therefore undergoing a renaissance that includes great recreational facilities, a huge network of mountain biking trails and awesome access to the national forest. Starbucks even opened up there in recent weeks.
But it doesn’t have Vail Mountain.
My mantra since moving out of Vail in 1995 and spending nearly a decade living in Edwards (halfway between Vail and Eagle) has always been that I would never move any farther west. At least in Edwards (Singletree to be precise) we could see the ski slopes of Arrowhead.
And there’s nothing wrong with Singletree. It’s a great neighborhood, with a really good golf course (Sonnenalp) and a burgeoning “town” nearby where a lot of real locals have chosen to relocate. But Singletree is mountain suburbia, and Kristin and I are definitely not suburbanites.
Our new “old” West Vail neighborhood, where just down the hill is the first place I ever lived in the valley, actually feels a lot more like a neighborhood than where we were in Singletree. There are young families around, working-class resort employees in the nearby condo complexes, and longtime Vail locals – all of us still clinging to the dream.
A friend from Avon recently referred to Vail, which, depending on whose stats you go with is made up of from anywhere between 70 and 80 percent second homeowners, as “that up-valley, so-called used to be a town.”
I found that amusing since Vail recently passes aggressive new mandatory regulations requiring developers to provide a certain percentage of their project in the form of employee housing and designed to house at least 30 percent of Vail’s workforce in town, while Avon has been hemming and hawing over purely advisory regulations that would have no real teeth.
With a new gondola slated to connect Avon to Beaver Creek this season, how long will it be before Avon is in the same second homeowner boat as Vail? Really, the entire county needs to get serious about workforce housing, but it shouldn’t stop there.
In Vail, there’s quite a bit of talk about steps to help middle-class families - the young professionals who make a place tick – get back into Vail. Candidates who seriously talk about such steps will get my vote in the coming Vail Town Council election, even though my wife and I found a way to do it on our own.
Not just because I want more kids in my neighborhood, but because young families give a place life, they fill the restaurants in the off-season when tourists are nowhere to be found, they shop in local stores, hang out at local parks, attend local schools, go to movie theaters and bowling alleys, and generally give a place a sense of life that visitors find invaluable.
Yes, Vail’s unbridled redevelopment will dominate the debate during this election (Vail’s new town bird is the construction crane), but those projects are either under way or coming down the pipe anyway. The key is to get them to fund a local renaissance by building workforce housing, making middle-class housing attainable through creative deed restrictions and adding world-class recreational facilities that both locals and tourists alike will utilize.
As of Friday morning, Oct. 5, 10 Vail Town Council candidates had turned in petitions to run for the five open seats on Nov. 6. Two incumbents, Lifthouse Condominiums manager Kevin Foley and Tivoli Lodge reservations director Kim Newbury, are running again, but Mayor Rod Slifer and council member Greg Moffet are term limited and therefore unable to run again. The fifth seat is being vacated by Kent Logan, who will not run for a second term.
The other hopefuls for the five seats include: former Vail Resorts president Andy Daly; developer Dave Irwin; Millennium Bank’s Scott Proper; former council member and District Attorney’s Office investigator Dick Cleveland; Colorado Ski and Snowboard Museum executive director and former ski company executive Susie Tjossem; retired Chicago attorney Margaret Rogers; bar manager Bob McKown; and Stephen Connolly, owner of his own marketing firm.
A couple of more petitions may have trickled in by 5 p.m., and I’ll update those and talk more about the candidates in a coming blog. Also, mark your calendar for the Thursday, Oct. 18 Vail Chamber and Business Association town council debate at Donovan Pavilion (see the ad below or go to www.vailchamber.org for more details.
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