Striking gold at Copper Mountain 12/7/10
The first good sign...the parking lot at 8:30
I knew the day had potential when I heard the sound of someone texting me at 5:40 in the morning. After looking at numerous snow reports calling for 3-6 the night before I had gone to bed thinking Tuesday would be a work day but kept the phone by the bed just in case. Sure enough, Copper Mountain called 9″ new with it still coming down and so I immediately switched into powder mode and started packing up. Roughly 3 hours later we pulled into the parking lot which had not been plowed and thus gave us a good preview of the fun to come.
It's a dirty job but someone's got to do it - Eric Hoerske breaking trail
Riding up the first lift we saw powder piled up everywhere and being early December very few people. We immediately headed over to the Alpine Chair for some steep and deep and quickly realized that we had hit the jackpot. The snow was midwinter light and fluffy and still coming down hard (they ended up calling 13″ at 1:00) so we ended up spending quite a bit of time in the “white room”.
Jean Francois getting all fuzzy
Can you find the skier in this picture?
Or the snowboarder in this one...
As we worked our way through all the open trails we thought it couldn’t get any better but fortunately we were wrong. The snow kept getting deeper and we started venturing into the trees only to discover that there were several marked glade trails that we had never been on before but that we will surely visit many times in the future.
Our two new favorite places on earth
The glades were, to put it mildly, in snowboard speak “totally awesome”. Steep pitches with nicely spaced trees, little or no tracks and a foot plus of powder made us very happy boys. One run deserved another and another and another till our legs started sending warning signals about potential collision possibilities. Even then it was hard to quit as conditions like this don’t happen every day particularly in early December.
Yes, it really was knee deep
So sadly we decided to call it a day and thank the snow gods for what they had blessed us with. I spent a good part of the ride back to town wondering if it was all a dream but fortunately I have these pictures to prove that it wasn’t. Later in the afternoon, Eric called me to tell me he had made his first ever hole in one in frisbee golf so I guess there was some special magic going on this day but if this was all his karma I’m just glad I got in on it. Like I always say after a day like today, life is good – and may I have another please…
