A New Mountain

There are 27 ski resorts in Colorado (I could be wrong on that, but I think I'm close). I told Mr X when we moved here that I want to eventually have skied or snowboarded at all of them. Then I found out that Silverton is for experts only and you have to have a guide and you use ski cats to get around and people die there every year. I'm not that brave. So I amended my original request and told Mr X and I'd like to eventually go to 26 of the 27 resorts in Colorado.


Here they are:

Ski Granby Ranch, Howelsen Hill, Durango, Sunlight, Beaver Creek, Keystone, Vail, Telluride, Eldora, Snowmass, Powderhorn, Loveland, Winter Park, Crested Butte, Copper, Aspen Highlands, Aspen, Buttermilk, Snowmass, Ski Cooper, Breckenridge, Steamboat, Wolf Creek, Monarch, Silverton, A-Basin,
and Purgatory

So far I've been to 9:

A-Basin, Monarch, Steamboat, Copper, Crested Butte, Winter Park, Breckenridge, Vail, and Keystone

I have a long way to go. Each year we try to go to one new resort. The first year it was a bunch since it was our first year here. The second year it was Crested Butte. The third year it was Steamboat. This year it was Monarch.

We spent two days there and the snow was incredible! The first day we had almost a foot of fresh powder. The second day we had 14 inches of fresh powder. That much snow was exhausting - and I mean that in the most exciting and fun way possible. My only two complaints about this place was that the crowd on Saturday was a little much (the mountain is rather small so it doesn't hold a crowd well) and that the runs are pretty short. Most are only about a mile and I think there's a couple that are 2 miles. Of course load of fresh champagne powder trumped both of those issues.

I didn't take photos (again, I know, I've been bad about that lately) so these are courtesy of the interweb:

This resort is 3 hours away from our house so we decided to stay overnight since we wanted to go for two days in a row. We like to try out hot springs here and there and we've sampled many here in Colorado. Pagosa Springs was our favorite to-date. But this place, Mt Princeton Hot Springs, took over the top spot for us. Great facilities, lots of soaking options, great water temperatures, very low on the sulphur-smell factor, beautiful scenery. Mr X especially enjoyed the natural pools nestled in the rocks next to the river. You can hardly make them out in the first photo but just look at the river and the rocks on the left-hand side of the photo contain some scalding hot pools of water. You can arrange the rocks so that more river water comes in to cool down the water temp.