Matt
Telluride has always held a certain mystique for me. Growing up we watched ski and snowboard videos every year in the months before the snow fell, while dreaming of the winter to come. I lived in a small town in British Columbia. The exotic names of the ski resorts we saw always got jumbled together, Vail, Squaw Valley, Chamonix, but one always stood out — Telluride.
My expectations were high when we visited Telluride. It was my first visit. We arrived in a whiteout that had us driving 30 miles an hour on the highway there. The first night the hill received several inches of snow and it kept snowing all the next day. The second day the sun came out and I got to ride Telluride the way it’s meant to be ridden — on steep pitches with over a foot of fresh pow.
This is how it was: legendary.
Telluride is a town named after a rare exotic metal that became a rare — and in it’s own way exotic — destination. Telluride has been a mythical place for me ever since I heard about it in the ski movies that my family watched each year in the weeks leading up to opening day. … Read more
When I opened up the Crested Butte trail map for the first time in my hotel room I was awestruck. I had never seen so much black on a trail map. Black and double-black diamond runs appeared to occupy more than half of the resort. About one-third of the Crested Butte’s 1,547 acres was, it turned out, was in fact extreme double-black diamond terrain.
“Could this be my dream hill?” I wondered.
I went on a mission to find the best ski and snowboard vacation experience in the USA. During my trip, I visited Crested Butte, and then compiled what I learned into this micro guide.
The video above contains lots of useful information, but, if you want to carry have this information on the hill where it will really come in handy, bookmark this guide on your phone.
We arrived at Crested Butte at the wrong time. Crested Butte is a real big mountain rider’s paradise. The north face is a huge area with amazing cliffs, chutes, and steeps. Unfortunately, it had been a few weeks since they’d had a good dump of snow, which is pretty necessary to enjoy that kind of terrain.
The saving grace of the trip was the opening of the High Lift T-Bar, which accessed previously closed terrain. So, although there was no fresh snow, there were some fresh tracks, and the local pros lit it up. This is what it looked like.
Crested Butte was a great surprise for me on this tour. I had heard little about the mountain before we arrived. When I opened up a map of the hill at the hotel desk I was pleasantly surprised by the swaths of black and double-black diamond runs blanket the north face of the mountain. I … Read more