Keystone

Started: 2023-01-11 20:22:11

Submitted: 2023-01-12 00:29:21

Visibility: World-readable

Visiting Colorado for a family ski trip

Our original plan for Christmas was to fly to Seattle to visit Kiesa's family, then fly to Denver to ski before flying home to SFO. (Tahoe is geographically closer, but driving there is a serious hassle so we don't.) Then the day we were supposed to leave, Seattle was covered in a sheet of ice and our flight was canceled. We managed to salvage the second part of our trip by rebooking on a brand-new flight direct from SFO to Denver, arriving on the same day we were originally scheduled to arrive.

Tuesday, 27th December

It was raining as we left home and drove over the mountain on highway 17 towards the airport. I was worried the rain might trigger crashes or mudslides or car-consuming potholes, but the road remained passable and traffic remained nominal and we had no trouble getting to the airport.

We ended up parking at the main terminal, because by the time I tried to reserve parking for our rescheduled trip the long-term parking garage was full. It wasn't clear where I might find parking in the maze of twisting passages on the lower levels of the doughnut-shaped parking garage in the middle of the terminals, but I eventually found a space on the first floor near the F/G doors, which turned out to be a short walk down the tunnel and an escalator ride up to the baggage claim level, and another elevator ride up to luggage check-in.

Checking our luggage proved slightly more involved than I first expected because I was bringing skis and a separate boot bag. Both pieces of luggage together counted as one bag against our baggage quota, but it wasn't obvious how to specify this at the kiosk, so I ended up having to talk to several people to get the right tag to check my bag.

At the security checkpoint, the agent at the metal detector indicated I had been randomly selected for extra screening, which involved a new-to-me screening: an agent swabbing my phone for an explosives trace check (which I passed).

Our flight was slightly delayed (and there was a shortage of seating at the airport gate, so we sat on the floor). Once we were in the air the pilot expected bumpy air most of the way to Denver, so we got an abbreviated, water-only in-flight service.

As we were descending towards Denver, through the bumpy air at the edge of the Rocky Mountains, I told Julian about Calvin's second plane trip, when we missed three approaches in a row landing in Denver. (It's possible Julian didn't completely appreciate this story, since we were at that moment in an airplane on a turbulent approach, but we landed safely a few minutes later.)

We arrived in Denver at the far western end of Concourse A, in what looked like a brand-new section of gates that didn't quite have new-airport smell but probably should have. We took the train to the main terminal and I wasn't quite sure if I was flashing back to every one of the more than two hundred times I've flown in to or out of DEN, or if I was just happy to be back in a place I remember after being gone for so long.

At baggage claim, when my skis came up, I had to wade through piles of baggage left over from the previous weekend's epic travel debacle to reach the fancy oversized luggage claim specifically designed to carry skis into Denver. (We flew on Tuesday, by which point most major airlines had recovered from the winter storms that, among other things, canceled our flight to Seattle; but Southwest was still struggling to maintain a fraction of their schedule. They didn't manage to resume regular service until later in the week, after they had a chance to turn the airline off and turn it back on again.)

By the time I remembered to reserve a rental car from Denver, my first choice for rental cars, Avis, had run out of SUVs, and I didn't think a Camry would be a good choice to take up the mountain to Keystone. (Avis is more expensive than other options, but when I was working for Qualcomm and traveling to San Diego on a regular basis I learned I could sign up for their "Preferred" service and the car would be waiting for me with my name on it and (depending on the layout of the local facility) the keys would be in the vehicle ready for me to drive off. This was such a massive improvement over waiting in an interminable rental car line and waiting for an agent to type their novel while purportedly renting me a car that I was happy to pay extra to have an hour of my life back every time I rented a car.) I turned to Enterprise, which gave me a reservation for a small SUV ("Nissan Kicks or Similar", not that it means anything to me), but couldn't promise all-wheel-drive or any actually useful feature for taking a vehicle up the mountain to go skiing. (I think they somehow figured out I had occasionally rented cars while traveling for Google, though it wasn't clear that all of my information was up-to-date, but this didn't end up causing any problems.)

The other thing that Enterprise wouldn't guarantee was whether the vehicle was legal to drive on I-70 between Denver and Keystone. The last year I lived in Colorado, the state began tightening the requirements on vehicles that could drive up I-70 in the winter, in order to reduce the number of vehicles that slid off the road due to poor tires, under the title of Traction Law. To travel up the mountains, vehicles needed a combination of all- or four-wheel drive, appropriate winter tires, and adequate tread — or chains. A few years ago they strengthened the requirements further and made the traction law permanent on I-70 in the mountains all winter long (rather than the complicated system they had in place before, where the traction law would get turned on and off depending on the weather conditions, which was probably overly complicated to implement), and added an extra fine if one's poor tire condition caused one's vehicle to block a lane of traffic.

We caught the rental shuttle to Enterprise, and by the time we got to pick our vehicle, we had several to choose from. (The agent who helped us choose our vehicle asked what color we wanted, as if that mattered.) We checked the tires and the tread and picked an all-wheel-drive Nissan (I think it was a Rogue, but I don't actually remember), which met all of the requirements of the Traction Law.

We ate supper at Noodles in Denver West (where Calvin, still wearing his sandals, stomped gleefully in the tiny scraps of snow left over in the corner of the paring lot), then we headed up I-70. It was breezy on the plains, and threatened to become blustery in the mountains, but the road remained clear most of the way up the mountain. Past Georgetown it started snowing; by the time we reached the Eisenhower Tunnel the road was slushy. Google Maps wanted me to take US 6 over Loveland Pass into Keystone (which was geographically shorter, but not necessarily faster, given it involved a winding two-lane mountain road ascending to and descending from the pass). Kiesa helped evaluate the route and I decided to stick to the Interstate. We emerged into blowing snow and a wet slushy road for the long descent down I-70 into Silverthorne. I stuck to the middle lane and observed the speed limit while I regained my snow wheels, and soon we reached the exit to turn off the Interstate. In Keystone I picked up our condo keys and we fond our condo, a two-bedroom unit in the Slopeside building at the Mountain House base area.

Wednesday

I woke up on Wednesday morning feeling nauseated, which threatened to derail my plans of skiing that day. I got myself up and out of the condo to deliver the kids to their ski lesson, which turned out to be a short walk from the condo. We dropped the kids off, and I was happy to see that they didn't need or want us to shepherd the kids through the process of getting their rental equipment.

I took a quick walk around the Mountain House base area, which turned out to be a very quick walk because it wasn't a very big base area. This area is used primarily by the ski school (though there's also a ski school based at the much larger River Run base area), and it only has one big express lift, plus a small chair lift used by the ski school for the bunny slope, and a couple of magic carpets for complete beginners like Julian.

While I was out I got coffee and stopped by the lift ticket office to check whether I actually had the right ski pass. Three years ago, in the Before Times, the last time I skied, I got a four-day Epic Pass, and Vail mailed me a physical pass card in the fall (using the passport photo I gave them in 2012). Last year I bought (but never used) a four-day Epic Pass, and there was some vague wording about not sending me a pass because I already had a card (and then a $4.99 refund a year later because they had charged me as if they were going to mail me a card and decided not to because I already had one; meanwhile I was worried they had sent a card to my old address in Seattle because they didn't ask for a shipping address in advance of my clicking "buy" and only then did they show me the old address). This year there was some similar wording around "if you had the same pass last year, just reuse the old one it'll just work", but I wasn't entirely sure I had actually found the right card, among the six other Epic Pass cards and day-passes and other assorted detritus I found in my boxes of unsorted papers.

I elided the entirety of the backstory at the lift ticket office and just inquired whether the pass was the right one, and the person behind the window confirmed that, yes, it was.

Back in the condo I took a second shot at eating breakfast, and by the time I finished I felt good enough to head out skiing. I walked out to the slopes and nipped up Peru Express, connected to Montezuma, and dropped down Mozart, as I tried to get my ski legs back. It had been three years since I last skied, but I still had enough muscle memory to make easy sweeping turns on the groomed blue runs and fast, precise turns on the steeper slopes.

What I didn't have after years living at sea level was enough red blood cells to keep up with the thin air at ten thousand feet, nor the muscle tone to make more than a couple of precise turns before I had to take a break. (Presumably I need to do more squats and leg lifts. Or any at all.) The snow conditions were fine; skiing in Colorado at the end of December is always kind of a gamble, and this year the snow was about average: thin in places, icy in spots, but overall acceptable. The resort was aggressively making snow anywhere it could, including under the Outback Express lift. This meant the resort had closed the blue runs under the lift, forcing me to drop into the glades on the north side of the lift. I found some of the best snow on the mountain in the glades, but skiing there exhausted me so I couldn't do more than one run at a time before heading back to North Peak and the easier blues around Santiago Express.

I ate lunch at the top of North Peak and spent most of the afternoon skiing Santiago Express, except for one trip back to Outback Express for one more exhausting (but also exhilarating) trip through the trees. By the middle of the afternoon it had started snowing, and people had started leaving the mountain. I didn't mind staying out in the snow but soon I realized that the blowing snow felt like it was sandblasting my face, in the space around my glasses below my helmet, as I skied. I dropped down all the way to the River Run base area and bought a pair of goggles for the last hour, which worked much better, but occasionally caused my glasses to fog up.

Kiesa picked up the kids after ski school, and both reported enjoying themselves, and got themselves promoted to the next level for the next day of the two-day lesson package I had reserved in advance. After supper, to keep the kids (and myself) in the mood for skiing, I looked for a Warren Miller ski movie to watch. This proved more difficult than I hoped it would be (at least unless I was willing to sign up for another bespoke streaming service, which I wasn't); eventually I found Wintervention for rental on Amazon. But it turned out I had read the date wrong; it was a Warren Miller Entertainment ski movie from 2010, after the eponymous ski pioneer had left the company he founded and the movies were made without his involvement. But it was still entertaining, even though Julian got bored half-way through and left to read by himself until it was time for bed.

Thursday

On Thursday, the kids had another day of ski school. They kept the rental equipment they had the day before, so I got to stage a picture of them together before dropping them off for their lessons.

By the time I reached the queue for the Peru Express lift, the lift was stalled and didn't seem to be starting up again. After waiting for a few minutes someone in front of me in the queue said something about an "electrical fault", and at that moment a shuttle bus pulled up heading for the River Run base area. The back third of the queue turned around together and headed for the bus. I got a spot on the bus and took the express lift at River Run to the top of the mountain.

I spent most of the day skiing the Santiago Express lift. The day started with a light dusting of new snow, which was pushed into bumps by the middle of the afternoon. The bumps along one side of one the blue runs were just about the right size and shape for me to practice on, remembering the rhythm of skiing bumps on a slope more manageable than the black runs on the same hill.

After two days in ski lessons, Calvin decided he wanted to go for a third day, so after I got down from the mountain I nipped over to the ski school desk and signed him up for a third day.

Friday

I took Calvin to his third day of ski school (which was somewhat more involved than it should have been, because I already had his lift ticket from the ski school desk but he didn't have his rental equipment yet), then took the day off myself after two days of skiing. I lounged around the condo, wrote a blog post, took the shuttle to River Run, got coffee, wandered around, came back, and picked up Calvin at the end of his day of ski school. (He spent the day skiing greens and some blues on Montezuma, half-way up the front side of the mountain.)

Saturday

After a couple of days when the snow bypassed Summit County on either side (earlier in the week both Vail and the Front Range got snow simultaneously, while Summit County stayed clear), we finally got a dump of new snow at Keystone on Saturday. The forecast called for 1-3 inches, but there was at least six inches on the patio outside the condo. I jumped on the Peru Express lift while it was still snowing big thick flakes, and as I rode the lift I couldn't help but marvel at the depth of new snow on the terrain park under the lift, as ski resort employees tried to clear and organize the snow so the terrain park was usable. At the top of the lift I headed to the Montezuma lift to take me to the top of the mountain. On Montezuma I could see runs without a single track on them, but I dropped down Mozart to head to North Peak (which is actually south of the main summit) and dropped down Ambush, a black run close to the fall line of the lift.

On Ambush there was somewhere between nine and twelve inches of new snow, more than enough to cover all of the bumps on the slope in a big thick sweater of snow, but as I skied I could still feel the bumps, and they interacted poorly with the technique required for skiing powder. Fresh snow requires large sweeping turns; there's too much friction to make the same sort of precise turns necessary to ski bumps under normal circumstances. So I ended up having to make sweeping turns over the powder and bumping awkwardly over the bumps hiding under the soft snow. But the whole thing was so amazing it was worth the awkward bumps.

After a couple of runs I stopped by the lodge at the top of the mountain for a break. The lodge was mostly empty, except for a group of resort employees preparing to go out into the snow. When I emerged from the lodge I couldn't find my skis on the rack until I looked carefully at every ski on the rack and realized that my skis were there, they were just covered in snow so I didn't recognize them. (My skis are neon green, so it's usually easy to find them in a lineup.)

I spent most of the day skiing the blues on North Peak, plus one more trip down a black on Cat Dancer. By the time I hit that trail, enough people had skied it that there was very little untracked snow left, but what was had been packed down and was relatively easier to ski on. This is for values of "relatively" that still meant I had to stop to catch my breath in the thin mountain air every couple of turns, but I did enjoy myself while doing it.

After lunch I caught the gondola back to Decrum Mountain, the main mountain above the base areas, and met Kiesa and the kids as they stepped off the River Run gondola with sightseeing tickets for the gondola. We walked across the snow at the top of the mountain to the snow fort that the resort had built, an impressive piece of snow construction, built with packed snow blocks that reminded me of a sand castle. The front of the castle was five meters tall, and each wall was probably fifteen meters wide. There was a small kid-sized entry at the front of the castle, but we decided to walk around the side looking for a better entry and found that the far side was actually missing entirely, so we could just walk in at ground level, which sort of hurt the effect. But the whole thing was impressive, with a couple of slides and tunnels sized for kids to run around, and Julian enjoyed himself, once I zipped up his coat for him.

Kiesa and the kids headed down the gondola, and I skied a couple of more runs then decided to retire for the day, in part because my right big toe was hurting from skiing all day. There was some bruising around the toenail, but it wasn't really clear what was going on with it. It kept hurting, off and on, for a couple of days; at one point I convinced myself that I had actually broken my toe, but then I saw a clear bruise under the toe nail and it stopped hurting as much.

I had remembered that I had run into trouble with my left big toe inside my ski boot, and I had trimmed that toe nail a bit more closely than my right before skiing, but then I checked my notes from 2015, the year I got my ski equipment, and it tells me that it was actually my right toe.

Keystone planned a New Year's celebration starting at 18:30 at River Run, finishing with fireworks, but no one really wanted to take the shuttle over to River Run, so we hoped that we'd be able to see the fireworks from Mountain House. Shortly after 19:00 we heard fireworks and looked out the window to confirm that, yes, we could, they were just visible over the mountain from our condo balcony. I grabbed my shoes so I could stand out on the condo in the cold night air and watch the whole show. Calvin stood out on the balcony for a few minutes before deciding he wanted to go inside after all. Kiesa and Julian watched from inside.

Sunday

Sunday was New Year's Day. We packed up the condo and ate breakfast at Sunshine Cafe in Silverthorne, then headed down I-70 to fly home from Denver. When planning our trip, I wanted to allow for enough time to get down I-70 in weather and traffic, so I booked a flight scheduled to depart at 17:52. But the morning was clear and bright, and the highway was almost dry, and there wasn't enough traffic to be a problem. We emerged from the last foothills in Morrison with enough time to take a detour to Boulder. We drove up CO-93 along the foothills, past Golden and Rocky Flats and dropped into Boulder Valley, still holding some snow after the big storm that hit the Front Range while we were skiing on ice at Keystone. Pearl Street seemed unchanged since I last lived in Boulder seven years ago. We dropped by the Boulder Bookstore, walked through the rock that had been cut in half, stood on the time capsule, looked at the county courthouse, found the restrooms in front of the courthouse locked, walked to the end of the mall, and walked back. The four blocks of Pearl Street Mall is packed with memories and meaning for me, but Calvin didn't remember anything, and Julian was too young to have any chance of remembering anything.

We drove out of town past more landmarks: shops and offices where I'd worked, restaurants and coffee shops, the old Google office, the new Google office. Here there was more signs of change: a building now stood at the corner of Pearl and 30th where there had been a hole in the ground four years ago. On Foothills Parkway the bike bridge crossing the highway next to the house where I grew up had been removed, replaced by a tunnel in the box culvert under the road.

I knew my way around town and out of town and all the way to the airport without consulting a map. When we reached the airport I took a detour to drive past the main terminal so Calvin could get a look at the apocalyptic hell horse greeting everyone at the airport, the statue with glowing red eyes that's so evil it killed its sculptor which still stands as a symbol of Denver or something. This was one thing that Calvin remembered and requested, and we'd been thwarted in the rental car shuttle bus because its windows had been tinted to the point of uselessness so all we could see was the evil glowing eyes.

(Then I made a wrong turn at the terminal and ended up in the paid parking lot, but the exit gate was happy to take my ticket and let me go without paying since I'd only been in the parking lot for about ninety seconds, just long enough to drive from one end to the other.)

We dropped off the car and caught the shuttle to the terminal. At baggage check we remembered to identify the boot bag separately from the ski bag, but this required an exception that needed a United employee to eyeball that we actually had a ski bag and also a boot bag, and that was easier said than done in the crowd of people all trying to figure out how to use the baggage kiosks.

The airport is under construction again, and has decided to lean into the conspiracy theories for comic effect.

We made our way through security and onto the train, then got off at A Concourse to walk to the very furthest east end to eat a late lunch at Snarf's Sandwiches. I still haven't found a sandwich I like as much as the ones I used to eat for lunch at Snarf's while I was working in Boulder. This time I bought a bottle of their pickled peppers so I can try to replicate their signature taste at home.

We reached our gate with plenty of time to spare, and then I looked up and realized that I couldn't see the A concourse across the tarmac any more because it was completely obscured in fog. I nipped over to Flight Aware and saw that my inbound aircraft was spinning in a holding pattern over Nebraska, and every other inbound track was also spinning in a holding pattern, while air traffic control tried to manage the decreased visibility. My flight was inevitably delayed (and then our gate moved), but at least Kiesa and I had a chance to figure out that we wanted to go camping at San Simeon this summer (and, because state park reservations are released six months in advance, they had just been released for the Fourth of July weekend, so I snapped up what some random website tells me is supposed to be a choice campsite).

At length our aircraft arrived from Chicago. We flew on a 757-300, which I think is the first time I've flown on this specific stretched model, though I've flown on plenty of 757-200s before. In honor of the stretch, we sat in the cozy mini-cabin at the very back of the plane, which was actually kind of a hassle once we reached SFO and had to wait for everyone else to get off the plane. When we emerged into baggage claim I saw that just about every inbound United flight from a United hub was at the same baggage claim, resulting in a mad crowd of people around the carousel and a pile of bags overwhelming the poor belt as it spun around because no one could find their bags. (At least my skis were easy to find, on the oversized baggage claim along the wall.) At some length I grabbed our bags and we made our way back to the car and back home after our winter ski vacation.