![]() If any mountain in Vail Resorts’ sprawling, intercontinental empire is almost guaranteed to deliver The Experience of a Lifetime™, it’s the namesake OG of them all: Vail Mountain. The Big Endless: 18 high-speed chairlifts, the Back Bowls™, a bit of rowdy and wild back in Blue Sky, a frenetic base village. Five thousand-plus acres of approachable terrain seated directly off the interstate. It does not minimize and mitigate crowds like Telluride or Aspen or Sun Valley.īut Vail Mountain stands out even on that hall-of-fame lineup. It does not get as much snow as Alta or Baker or Wolf Creek or Kirkwood. Yes I know, Backflip Bro: the terrain is not as Rad-Gnar as Snowbird or Jackson Hole or Taos or Palisades Tahoe or Big Sky. Vail Mountain sits at the summit of American lift-served skiing. I’m not sure what else I can add to that. But it was the best five days of skiing that I had, up to that point, ever done. I won’t say it was The Experience of a Lifetime. Vail Mountain and – on that same trip – Beaver Creek, were exactly what I needed them to be: the aspirational summit of America’s lift-served skiing food chain. That impossible blend of wild and approachable. Refills from the sky even though it was April. That first time standing over Sun Down Bowl, the single groomed path winding toward High Noon below. As though skiing were a videogame and I could not pass to the higher levels until I’d completed those that came before.Īnd then there it was. Primed on Midwest bumps, anything would have seemed enormous. Vail is a social-media trophy – go seize it. In our megapass-driven, social-media-fueled moshpit of a present, I doubt anyone thinks this way anymore. Three-sided and endless, galloping back into valleys, super-fast lifts shooting in all directions. This American place most synonymous with skiing. To start with Vail would have seemed presumptuous. I articulated this as well as I could a couple months ago, in an article about Vail Resorts’ decision to limit lift ticket sales for the coming ski season: Lift count: 32 (one 12-passenger gondola, one 10-passenger gondola, 4 six-packs, 14 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 1 T-bar, 3 platters, 5 carpets) Trail count: 276 (53% advanced/expert, 29% intermediate, 18% beginner) To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.īeth Howard, Vice President and General Manager of Vail Mountain, ColoradoĬlosest neighboring ski areas: Beaver Creek (20 minutes), Copper Mountain (23 minutes), Ski Cooper (42 minutes), Keystone (42 minutes), Loveland (43 minutes), Arapahoe Basin (47 minutes), Breckenridge (50 minutes) - travel times may vary considerably in winter and heavy traffic. This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on Nov. To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |