Great Plains, Rocky Mountains

Started: 2026-02-04 19:34:25

Submitted: 2026-02-04 21:19:49

Visibility: World-readable

Departing the plains for the mountains

On New Year's Eve we left Kansas City to begin the next phase of our Christmas/New Year's travel, spending a couple of days skiing at Winter Park.

Because of our complicated multi-city itinerary, we flew into Omaha and flew out of Kansas City. This meant that my very first visit to Kansas City's airport was driving up to it. This is an unusual experience for me; most of the time when I visit a new airport I fly in first and then depart via the same airport.

We checked our bags, went through security, and headed down the walkway to our gate at the end of the furthest concourse. Once we had settled down at the crowded gate to wait for our flight, we began to hear a series of ominous announcements on the PA, starting with "If you are pre-security please exit the terminal". (Our announcement to please exit the airport has raised many questions already answered by the announcement.) We were already well past security and settled at our gate, so it seemed like the announcement didn't apply to us. Over the next several minutes we heard additional announcements repeating and somewhat clarifying the announcement (they explicitly excluded everyone already through security). The announcements stopped after a couple of minutes, and we proceeded to board our flight and depart for Denver. (Kiesa scoured the Internet for information and eventually found local news reports that said there was a threat that the airport had to investigate, but they didn't think it was especially credible, and it turned out not to be anything.)

737 wing descending into Denver

We landed in Denver without further incident. I took the kids on a trip to the very end of concourse A to the nearest Snarf's, makers of my favorite sandwiches. (I picked up a jar of their pickled peppers to take home with me.) I found Kiesa next to baggage claim and we ate our lunch and waited for the shuttle to take us to Winter Park.

My inspiration for the ski trip to Winter Park was to take the ski train from Denver to Winter Park, then catch the long-distance California Zephyr the rest of the way home from Winter Park. But the ski train only operates on weekends, and only operates up the mountain to Winter Park in the morning and down the mountain to Denver in the evening. This meant that the train wouldn't work for our trip; but it turned out there were enough other shuttle operators that were set up to pick people up from the airport and drive us up the mountain in their vans and drop us off where we needed to be in the mountains.

We caught the shuttle van we had reserved when it pulled up to the curb outside the airport terminal and rode through Denver and into the mountains to Winter Park. There was construction underway to expand the two lanes of I-70 climbing Floyd Hill to three lanes. As we climbed into the Rocky Mountains I began to wonder if I should be seeing more snow. There was some snow on the mountains flanking the highway, but at the highest elevations above treeline the mountains were bare of snow. There was enough snow for skiing at Berthoud Pass, and as we descended into the north-facing slopes of the Grand Valley the snow grew deeper below treeline. (We passed a pickup truck pulling a trailer that had somehow gotten itself stuck with the trailer hanging precariously off the road in a snowbank, while another four-wheel-drive vehicle stopped nearby trying to figure out if they could help.) The Mary Jane base area was closed (due to poor snow conditions, I learned the next day). We turned into the Winter Park base area and stopped right in front of the Zephyr Mountain Lodge, the closest lodging to the ski lifts, where we were staying for our ski trip to Winter Park.

Winter Park base from the Zephyr Mountain Lodge

In the evening, after we'd unpacked in our cozy one-bedroom ski condo, I set out to do the laundry we'd accumulated since leaving Lincoln. The laundry room itself was easy to find, down the hall from our unit. The laundry machines took credit cards instead of quarters, which was handy (except that the machines seemed to expect to receive the signal from the credit card reader at exactly the right moment in a poorly-documented sequence, so I had to try several times to get the drier going). I needed quarters (from the ski locker room) to get laundry detergent, so I had to visit all of the locations mentioned on the sign posted in the laundry room. This felt like a quest in a puzzle-adventure game where I had just entered a new location on the map and now I had to find the places it referenced in order to unlock the rest of the level.

Clues for a quest at the Zephyr Mountain Lodge

I double-checked arrangements for skiing the next day, and made sure I knew where we were supposed to go and when to get the kids into their rentals and lessons. I did not stay up until midnight (local time) to witness the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026.