I got home at 1am last night from silverton.

You may be asking yourself: “But didn’t you have work monday?”

Yes, I most certainly did.

However, all of the roads in and out of silverton were most definitely closed until exactly 5:45pm on monday, so I had no choice but to not go to work on monday. Darn.

Just to get it out of the way, I just want to say that saturday was quite possibly one of the best skiing days I have ever had. The snow was amazing, there weren’t more than 40 people on the mountain, and the terrain at silverton is, quite simply, insane. I got in 5 runs, as I posted in the last post, and every one of them was through massive amounts of powder. I was so excited that I didn’t stop until they wouldn’t let me on the lift anymore.

I would go back there in a heartbeat, and may very well do that before this season is up. Sorry I don’t have more pictures of the actual skiing, but the truth is, it was snowing the whole time we were there, so they would have all looked something like this:

It was a weekend of much snow. The heavens opened up on friday, and still wasn’t stopping when we finally got out monday night. This meant the snow was great, however, it also meant there was more snow than the city of silverton could handle.

Silverton Mountain never opened on sunday, and I heard a rumor that the ski patrollers couldn’t even get up the 6 mile road to the mountain because there were so many avalanches covering it. So, instead we ended up skiing somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 runs at a little local hill in silverton called “Kendall Mountain”:http://www.skikendall.com/. Those 50 runs were covered in a matter of a few hours, because Kendall mountain has a whopping vertical gain of somewhere around 200 feet. However, covering that 200 feet of vertical there was 2 feet of fresh powder. We made do.

It reminded me of “Paoli Peaks”:http://www.paolipeaks.com/, only with powder instead of ice. It brought me back to the days of 2 turn runs and building kickers in the middle of the slopes.

That night we got a few drinks at the “Pride of the West”, which seemed to be the local hangout for after a hard day of massive vertical. After that, we went back to the “Grand Imperial”:http://www.grandimperialhotel.com/, where everyone was getting a little stir crazy with all the snow and no skiing. Soon after our arrival, a plan was formed to play hide and go seek on the first floor and in the basement of the maze-like, 100+ year old hotel we were staying in. Dan, the manager, served us all up some drinks, and we proceeded to get lost in the basement of the hotel for the next 3 hours. It was an absolute blast.

Monday brought more snow, and no lift-service skiing. A plan was hatched to hike up the local powerline run, and everyone geared up with snowshoes and skins. I ended up cruising up with Will, Casey, and the Nack-attack. Will and Casey were down from snowmass with their friend Andrea (who, unfortunately missed out on monday due to a headache she was fighting). It turns out there is a nice even-grade set of switchbacks up to the top of an 1100′ powerline cut that we made short work of (about an hour on the first run). It was nice and packed down, which made it quick-going. We even saw a couple snowmobiles coming up with skiers in tow. I guess it was as close as anyone was going to get to lift-service skiing that day.

Since the cut is fairly narrow with lots of vegetation on either side, and is skiied often, it is very stable snowpack. That fact was key, considering everything that could slide was sliding on monday because of such a heavy, quick buildup of snow. The first run was a mix of tight trees and sweet turns under the powerlines. The rest of the crew headed back to the hotel after that run, and I threw on the skins and cranked back up in about 30 minutes for another run. It was a good little end to skiing part of the trip.

“CDOT”:http://www.dot.state.co.us/ got on it and decided to open a window monday night for all of us to get out. It’s a good thing they did, because silverton is getting more snow as we speak, and they were talking about us having to stay the weekend if we didn’t get out on monday. That would have been horrible.

Really.

All in all, it was an incredible weekend, and I was glad we pulled the trigger on Silverton. Awesome skiing, cheap hotels, and good people. What more could you ask for?

I threw together a gallery of some of the other pictures we got while we were there, so “check it out here”:http://www.handlebarsandwich.com/wordpress/wp-gallery2.php?g2_itemId=3632

Oh yeah, and the icing on the cake? I got an email saturday night about singlespeed worlds, and I’m in. I’ll see ya’ll there.