I took this gorgeous picture myself.
I immediately knew I had to get onto that mountain as fast as humanly possible. The women in my family were off to Salt Lake to shop for the holidays. This prevented any of them to join me on what was going to be one of the best adventures I will ever have. My father, the best skier of us, was restricted by his work and was forced to me teased by the view of the mountain from his office window. I made a few quick calls to my best friends that skied, but none of them were able to go out that day. At the time, I thought it would suck going out alone, but looking back, I am happy I went by myself.
Imagine this, you are in a ski lift line with a few of your friends. The line doesn't seem to be moving as you and the people around you that are equally anxious are bumping shoulders as you try to squeeze ahead. This long and uncomfortable experience can easily be avoided if you ditch said friends for the glorious single's line. This doesn't mean single relationship wise (well, it can I guess?), but it means people who are riding by themselves. This is the golden ticket to quickly breeze pass the funnel of people that Vail tricks into thinking they are each somehow going to get to the top within a good amount of time (as my sister would say, fucking Vail). I probably saved about forty five minutes at least by riding with the singles line.
This process lead me to "flop" my ski to lift time ratio. I started my day by going to the Orange Bubble lift (btw I am at the Canyons). This part of the mountain contains some of the runs I know best. This allowed be to scout out my powder "stashes." I lapped that a few times, getting knee high snow. I thought I should explore more of the mountain so I headed towards the base. As skiing past Red Pine Lodge, I noticed how absurdly long Saddleback's line was. I decided to abandon this plan and head towards Tombstone. Anyone who has made that journey can sympathize with this next part. As I was skiing down the earlier skied out powder that is now what us locals call "mashed potatoes," I had to deal with all the tourists that make the extremely unpredictable turns. Sean Lydon and I have agreed that if we were ever to commit genocide (not that we will), we would first kill these tourists.
I finally reached Tombstone with a welcoming of a predicted twenty five minute line. As explained earlier, I hopped in the singles line and It took roughly three minutes. With the immense amount of people, I thought I should get out of there as quickly as possible. But as I rode up that first chair, I looked down into the aspens to see some of the best powder we have had in years. I figured the line only took a few minutes and started lapping Tombstone. I ended up lapping Tombstone for the rest of my day.
This was the first of the best three days of skiing I have ever had. More on that later.
