I was a bit nervous when we left Denver around 7 am - it was snow/sleeting, hard to see and the interstate was slushy and slippery. I was not looking forward to the drive up the mountain, but just after getting out of town, the weather improved immensely. We had one tense moment when a pickup in front of us, one lane over started fishtailing into our lane, but fortunately we were slightly behind him and missed hitting him.
We stopped in Dillon to grab some breakfast and swing by a ski rental shop to pick up discounted lift tickets. We also ended up with a ski helmet (we had just brought Gavin's bike helmet), which was used/refurbished and looked way more safe than his bike helmet, ski socks, new (really warm) glove/mittens for both of us, and t-shirts for the boys.
But, I am so glad we did, because we were in for a COLD couple of days! Sunday we skied Keystone, which is where we spent most of our time skiing when I was younger. It was about 15 degrees, but windy and snowy, so it felt worse. I had to run into the lodge after a couple runs and buy a face mask, it was so cold!
Gavin did pretty well - although we had some issues with stopping - not that he couldn't stop, but I told him he needed to stop whenever there were trail signs, or the trail split in two directions - to make sure we picked the right trail.
He had a hard time hearing me behind him with his face mask and helmet on and at one point he didn't stop, and headed straight down a blue trail. Tough lesson! But we made it.
By this point it was well into the day and he was getting worn out (he'd woken up at 5 am remember??). We looked at the trail map and decided to go with "Ripperoo's Run (Easiest Way Down)" as it was marked on the map. Sounds like a nice, easy path - right?
Well, it may have been the easiest way down, but we couldn't tell you, because we could not.find.the.trail. Oddly enough, I don't remember this one from my days out there. We did find it at one point, and then hit a fork in the trail. I was tempted to keep going across what looked like a pretty flat trail through the trees when Gavin noticed a dark brown, bear shaped sign with an arrow pointing down the hill. It said Ripperoo's Run. Going against my gut, we followed what (we thought) the sign indicated.
Basically all hell broke loose from there! On the green trails, there were very few people, but there was more traffic on the blues. And that's where we ended up, on some pretty tricky blues and Gavin had not yet mastered the art of carving back and forth across the mountain. And then his goggles started fogging up but he didn't tell me until he literally couldn't see anything. So there was a lot of falling and me trying to get him up, and the above quote. We managed to get to the bottom, take off his goggles (it had stopped snowing at this point) and got another couple runs in before we called it a day at 4 pm (our first ride up the gondola was at 10:15 am) so we got in a good full day of skiing. Gavin was asleep by the time we hit the parking lot.
He was so tired he declined eating out at a restaurant, and we just stayed in the condo and relaxed and ate leftovers from our delicious Italian room service the night before. He had quite a headache, but a little ib profen and he was bouncing off the walls! I had to make him go to sleep at 9 pm.
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