Snowboarding at Vail

Last Thursday night while Mr X and I were sound asleep there was a snowstorm going on outside. When we woke up bright and early Friday morning (incidentally I had the day off) we looked outside to a delightful four inches of fresh snow. So we checked the ski reports and discovered that Vail had gotten 9 inches of fresh powder. So onto the car went our gear and off we went to the mountains to play for the day.

I had this idea in my head that Vail was going to be the best place to snowboard of any that I'd tried so far this year. I was very disappointed. I thought the mountain/lifts where laid out poorly, making getting around to the different parts of the mountain a bit cumbersome. Since it was difficult to get to the various peaks via lifts, we had to take the lifts all the way back up and go on these long windy cat-tracks any time we wanted to get to a different part of the mountain. Cat-tracks are not particularly fun and when they are super long they get really boring - especially if you have to keep taking them. My other problem with Vail is that the runs themselves seem to be either difficult or easy. They didn't have a good mix of all different degrees of difficulty. And my final problem with Vail was the crowd - they were rude, they had an attitude of entitlement and there were way too many of them. Oh - another minus is how incredibly commercialized the village area of the resort is - I didn't like it. I would say Vail is my least favorite ski resort in Colorado so far. (Of course Mr X and I still had a fun day. It was our day off and we were snowboarding even if it wasn't the best resort.)

The good news, however, is that Mr X and I remembered our camera and so we were finally able to take some pictures for you. But as always, the pictures never quite seem to do the landscape justice.

(This is at the top of one of the peaks at Vail - a couple lifts converge at this point.)