Powder Day

On Sunday night driving back from the condo to our place in Breck, it was snowing so hard that we could barely see the road. We hadn’t seen it snow this hard since we got here two months ago. This prompted us to get up early on Monday morning to check the snow report. Sure enough, there was lots of new snow everywhere: Breck 9”, Copper 11”, Vail 10”, Keystone 8”, etc. We decided to ditch the planned snowshoe trip and called Sarah’s family to get them moving. Despite it being only 6:30 in the morning, Lisa heard “powder day” and was up immediately. Sarah’s mom wanted time to wake up and think about the change of plans, but Sarah insisted that there was no time to think about it on a powder day. Sarah’s dad was fighting a cold and a sore back, so he’d spend the day hanging out in the hot tub and wandering around Frisco.

We decided to go to Breck for the day. This day was tied for the most new snow we’ve had on any single day all season. Powder is great fun to play in, but it does take some getting used to if you’ve only ever skied groomed runs. Lisa dove right in. Here she is on an early run on Peak 10:


Here’s Brian after eating some snow:


Here’s Lisa putting herself back together after a fall:


Later, we moved to the 6 chair on Peak 8. The 6 chair typically has untracked powder much later than the lower runs on the mountain. Lisa did a nose dive and is wallowing in the powder trying to get up:



By lunchtime, the altitude was getting to Lisa (it’s rough going from sea level to over 9,000 feet) and Mom was getting tired. We decided that Brian would take Lisa on one run from the top of the Imperial Chair, the highest chair in North America. From there, you are at almost 13,000 feet and you can ski all the way back to the base of Peak 7 at around 9,500 feet. Sarah and her mom would ski on the bottom of the mountain and meet up with them in a couple runs.

Lisa at the top of the Imperial Chair:


Now that she could say she’d been to the top, Lisa was ready to call it a day. There was a slight clearing and we took a photo from Peak 7 then headed back to the gondola to go home.