A Colorado New Years

For New Years this year, I traveled to Colorado to visit John and do some skiing. I have never skied outside the East Coast, so I was excited to experience the wonders of Colorado skiing. I flew into Denver on December 30 (if I remember correctly) and John and I spent the afternoon driving around the city. We ate at a Mexican restaurant called Rio Grande (not to be confused with the Rio Grande chain out East), stopped in the Patagonia store, and then went to the giant REI store.

This is Union Station in Denver. I thought it was really pretty.

These are some photos from the REI store. It was inside an old factory building, so it was enormous. The first photo shows the big climbing wall in the middle of the store. I actually ended up buying a tent for $40 (originally cost $120) at their members-only garage sale. The garage sale is when they sell all items that have been returned for reduced prices. On every item they say why it was returned. The tent I found is a Kelty 2-person tent and the only problem with it was that it was a little short for someone over 6' tall. We set it up in the room where the sale was taking place and it seemed to be just fine otherwise!

That night, John, his sister Anna, her boyfriend, John's college friend Tom, and I went to the light show at the Colorado Springs mountain zoo. It was a lot of fun, even if it was freezing cold and snowing! They had most of their exhibits open (both indoor and outdoor) with Christmas lights lining the buildings and paths. The coolest exhibit to me was the tiger area. I experienced a little primal fear seeing the tiger pace around the area, melding in and out of the darkness as he went from the back of the area (which was wooded) back to the front (where we were).

Looking out over Colorado Springs.

This was a cool light set-up: It is a tiger placed over a path. So, as you walk down the path, it's like you are getting eaten by the tiger and you walk through his body (see the ribs).
The best exhibit though was the giraffes. I think John told me it's the largest population of this type of giraffe in America (or the world?). You could buy cookies to feed the giraffes, so it was really easy to get them to the fence to take a photo.

This photo cracks me up!

There was a baby there too!

So I of course decided to buy some cookies and feed the giraffes. :-) It was hilarious.

I started out with just one...Then two...

Then three! Then I ran out of cookies.

These were some really cool lights they had down a hillside that looked like water coming down the hill.



The next day we left for Breckenridge. Due to all the snow, the highway from Denver was closed. The road we were taking was also closed in the morning, but then opened up. However, it caused a huge backup. So we moved VERY slowly down this mountain pass, which was fine by me!

John's parents had gotten us a condo in Frisco, a little town between Breckenridge, Keystone, and Copper Mountain (the three resorts where we were going to ski). When we arrived, we first went to dinner at the famous Dillon Dam Brewery by the Dillon Dam. Unfortunately, due to the crowds, they were out of the item I was most anticipating -- buffalo burgers. But it was good food none-the-less. We went straight from there to Keystone, where they were having a light parade and fireworks for New Years. The light parade is where ski and snowboard instructors go down one of their slopes at night carrying a flare in each hand. It was really cool!

Here are some photos.

At the end of the slope, all of the participants put out their flares, then started shouting and lifting their boards and skis in the air. I felt like shouting "We've won! We've conquered the Germans!" Or something along those lines. It seemed like we had just won a battle or something. :-) Then we waited around for the fireworks. They were very good!

After the fireworks, we booked it back to the car and the condo. It was seriously cold. Probably about -2 degrees or something. This is a shot of the little town at the base of the mountain.

Once back at the condo, we watched the countdown on TV and fooled around with our cameras (John had gotten a new one for Christmas and he was actually reading the manual, unlike me. So he taught me how to do some things.)

We got up the next day and made our way to Breckenridge (or, Breck, as I found out the locals call it). See how chilly it was? And that was off the mountain, not counting wind chill!

The mountain.

The great thing at Breckenridge was this gondola that they put in to transport people from the parking lot in the town to the base of the resort. It was awesome.

My one complaint about Colorado skiing is the time spent in lift lines and on the lift. Since the mountains are so big (which makes for a good long run), it just takes a while to actually get to the top.

I accidentally got on the lift chair behind John and Anna.

John's sister, Anna.

No doubt that the scenery was beautiful!

I was proud that I actually did mostly blues while I was out there. I guess I can officially call myself an Intermediate skier now.

We had originally planned to go night skiing at Keystone, but decided against it since I was exhausted and it was SO darn cold outside! The next day, we went to Copper Mountain, John's favorite resort. Luckily the weather was great for this day. I think it was in the 30's. We got a lot more skiing in this day. It reminded me a lot of Snowshoe in West Virginia.

Me with John's family (except his other sister, Kate, who lives in Florida.)

John convinced me to ski on the backside of the mountain. I couldn't believe I agreed to it since all I had ever heard about backsides of mountains was double black diamonds where experts skied through the trees and down steep unkempt slopes. But he said there was one blue slope back there we could go on, so I agreed. The view was breathtaking!

You can see the sign behind me in the photo on the right for that blue slope. However, once we started on it, John convinced me to go down a black diamond. It didn't look so bad from my vantage point, but I discovered it was much harder than it looked. It was full of piles of powder, which are difficult for me to ski through. I fell several times and got very frustrated, but in the end, I was glad I experienced my first black diamond and survived to tell about it.

A video of John snowboarding down the mountain.

We drove through Breckenridge on our way back to CO Springs, and it was so pretty with lots of lights. Most of the photos I took didn't come out, but here are a few.

A short video of Breckenridge. Kind of looks like our fake Dickens Village!

It was a great trip, but next time I would like to plan more time out there so I can get more skiing in. I would recommend it to anyone!