Deep in Colorado: Road Trippin'

Colorado is cold. The kind of cold you suck up and brave for a killer pow day, and a week later parts of your feet are still numb to the touch. Parts of your face are peeling off too. The little crescent shaped part of check where your balaclava and the bottom of you goggles don’t quite come together. And your nose, it’s like a sunburn peeling. People back home in the much milder Pacific Northwest look at you kind of crazy.

We pulled out of Aspen Monday night following a full week of events and parties at Winter X Games. There’s a traffic jam on Main Street already. Everyone’s trying to get out of town, but they are all a bit too afraid to hit the gas and go for it. Trucks are chaining up way down in the flats by the airport.

The drive from Aspen to Breckenridge is nearly indescribable. It’s like fallout beyond the comfort of the SUV’s cabin, and it’s hard to see past the hood. We get passed by a VW Beetle. We’re okay with it. It’s some taillights to follow. We don’t want to be responsible for leading the train of cars and trucks off the highway, where it’s now nearly impossible to distinguish the edges. What should be a two-hour drive is four.

All logic suggests the next day at Breck would be good. At least eight inches fell and the sky is bluebird. But the wind, oh the wind. Breckenridge is the most wind-scoured mountain we’ve seen in a long time. Deep in the trees the snow is so wind-affected it’s not rideable. Skiing the “fresh” is a scene of flailing appendages. Calling the snow “grippy” would’ve been the understatement of the year.

Faced with sub-zero temps, ripping winds, and good snow gone bad, the only thing to do was hop in the car and drive. We set our course to the Southwest. Wolf Creek gets more snow than anywhere in Colorado (it’s on par with Mt. Baker right now) and we heard the snow phone was currently off the hook.

A five-hour drive to do anything else would suck. Somehow, on a ski trip, it’s no big deal. Nothing is amusing like the middle of nowhere Colorado. Highlights of the drive included 60 mph cross winds, the Cowboy Cantina, finding a “Girls Gone Fly Fishing” calendar at a gas stop, and passing Colorado’s only alligator farm. Yes, I said, “alligator farm.”

Arriving at a completely new mountain in the midst of a storm cycle certainly bodes well for first impressions. Wolf Creek was serving up a foot of fresh and it was dumping. The layout of Wolf is pretty flat with some hero-pow runs through nicely spaced trees. On the outer edge, however, a ridge rises that is cake-walk of hike to get on top of. You can go either way down the ridgeline, but we preferred skiers left. Cornices galore and steep pow fields into trees and chutes stayed fresh and filled in all day long: partially due to the ripping wind and partially due to the fact there was maybe 20 people hitting the ridge all day long.

The ridge isn’t the only gem we found at Wolf Creek. If you meander through the flats long enough, or just get a trail map, you’ll inevitably come across the “Waterfall” area. Holy pillow lines, Batman! We hucked everything in sight, it was that deep. It was obvious if you could manage to miss the hard things like rocks and trees, the big ones anyway, you’d be fine.

Seven hours and no lunch after the first chair, we loaded up the last one with the patrollers. It was a full bell to bell day of untracked goodness and the only price to pay was a little bit of frostbite and another five hours back to Breck to catch a plane the next day. People who don’t know might call 10 hours of driving for 7 hours a skiing a bit crazy. If you ever find yourself freezing you butt off in Colorado, getting to Wolf Creek is the sanest thing you can do.