Swimming in Snow at Crested Butte

Since we spent half of last ski season in the summer time, we decided to make this year a ski year. Hence the Mammoth trip, this trip to Monarch and Crested Butte, and probably a couple more trips coming up. Seems the snow god(s) are on our side this time. Unlike our 2014 trip to Whistler that was very wet, this trip was dry, cold and super snowy!

As a quick heads up, there’ll be some commentary here. So please excuse my interrupting the pretty pictures with various musings. Ok, ready?

To start, keep this image in mind. This is the view out a back window of the YouTube offices in San Bruno, CA, right near the SF airport, right before we left. Observe the lack of snow and lush, green, summery look.

Compare that against this photo from arriving back at my parents place in CO. It had been snowing a ton over the last 1-2 days, and a huge snow drift covered the driveway. So we busted out the shovels and (more importantly) the snow blower to get inside.

Ok, moving on. So we met up with my parents in Denver on a Thursday evening and headed out to Monarch early the next morning. (As a quick fun fact, Monarch was developed as a ski area in the 1930s as a Works Project Administration effort, making it the 3rd ski area to open in CO, and ~48th in the US.) It was a beautiful early morning drive. (And bonus points, the extra pair of skis we lashed on top of the roof rack made it all the way with no problem!)

On the way, we saw quite a few deer, a couple rabbits, and a huge herd of elk. (Thousands probably, hanging out on a long ridge line in some pasture land.)

Monarch had been getting tons of snow as well, but with some temperature fluctuations. So as we tried out different slopes and different elevations, we found a wide variety of snow conditions and depths. Some of them were fantastic, so the day ended up being really fun. Some selected photos:

After skiing for most of the day, we packed up and headed a little further down the road to Crested Butte, where we met up with Michelle, Jeff, Phillip, Nel and Gen later that day.

Crested Butte is a cute little town. It fits very compactly into a nice flat square-ish space at the junction of a couple of valley systems. And when we arrived, we found tons of snow. We knew it had snowed a lot recently, but they looked buried. (Apparently this kind of huge snow level is common in California when we’re not in a drought. It’s rather rare in Colorado to get so much all at once. So this was a fun experience for everyone!)

Ok – before we start talking about the skiing, we should take a moment to disambiguate a few things: Crested Butte the ski resort sits on the side of Crested Butte the mountain. The ski village of Mt Crested Butte is where the base area of the ski resort is located, and it’s about two miles up the road from Crested Butte the town, where the two grocery stores in the area are (among other things).

The ski resort has some awesome terrain. It’s a little hard to navigate, in the sense that you often have to take two or even three lift rides to get back to some place that you started. But that also means you can ski from pretty much the top of the mountain to the very bottom, which makes for some epic runs. In between the top and the bottom on that path, there are some big bows, steep tree runs, and general fun all around.

One more fun trivia question to wrap up! In 1939 Colorado’s first chairlift was jerry-rigged from an aerial mining tram, a World War I Army truck and 6100 feet of cable from an old mine. Where was this lift located?

…

At Cement Creek, about 5 miles below Crested Butte! The area was known as the Pioneer Ski Area and the lift was named “The Comet.”