NORDHAUS: Slow ride leads to fresh powder

By Hannah Nordhaus, Special to the Rocky

Published March 18, 2008 at 12:45 a.m.

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Photo by Nathan Bilow / Special To The Rocky

Snowboarders ride the chairlift at Monarch Mountain ski area.

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I hate high-speed chairlifts. There, I said it. I know that statement contradicts the will of the people and the profit models of most of Colorado's ski areas, which are constantly socking away excess cash and borrowing and mortgaging and floating IPOs so they can upgrade their lifts to be faster and carry more people and keep up with the other ski resorts who have even faster lifts that carry even more people.

I know people want to get up the mountains quickly. I know that high-speed lifts make the lift lines move, and I know that people - myself included - hate lift lines.

But as much as I hate lift lines, I hate fast lifts even more. They're cold, because they move so fast that they create their own wind. They make lift tickets more expensive. They burn out your legs so that you have to spend even more money refueling at the lodge in order to survive a day riding those speedy lifts.

They're also the reason, if you ask me, that after 10 a.m. on a powder day, the snow is already so bumped up that it might as well not have snowed at all. These diabolical chairlifts can transport more people up the mountain than the terrain can handle. They ruin the snow.

I realize I'm probably not a typical ski consumer - if I had my druthers, I would spend most of my time in the backcountry. I'd rather have two or three good runs in untracked snow, even when it's only so-so, than rack up huge vertical skiing hardpack.

Maybe that's why, when I do ski in-bounds - and I hit the resorts far more frequently than I have just led you to believe - I tend to avoid the ones with "express" lifts.

Fortunately, that's still pretty easy to do. There are a number of ski areas within reach of Denver that keep it real slow. These include Arapahoe Basin, Eldora Mountain Resort, Loveland Ski Area, Monarch Mountain, Powderhorn Resort, Silverton Mountain, Ski Cooper and Sunlight Mountain, as well as Taos Ski Valley in New Mexico.

When you ski at these places, you not only avoid having to sully yourself with a high-speed quad, you also avoid taking out a second mortgage to purchase your lift tickets; you don't have to look down at high-rise condos and trophy homes as you ski; and at the base lodge, you can feed a family of four for the same price it might cost to buy one burger at some of our swankier resorts.

A couple of years ago, my husband and I stopped at Monarch Mountain on our way down to New Mexico for Christmas. We got there at 11 on what was, for Monarch, a busy Saturday and a powder day to boot.

We rushed up the lift, hoping we'd still be able to enjoy the last few morsels of soft snow before it was all gone. Our first destination was the hike-to Mirkwood Bowl, where we figured we'd see our best shot at powder turns. We weren't mistaken: After three round trips, we were still skiing untracked snow.

Once the patrol closed Mirkwood for the day, we hit the rest of the mountain. It wasn't untracked, but it was still mighty soft, nothing to complain about. When we were ready to quit for the day, we decided to ski a run that would take us right down to our car. We traversed out a ways, herringboned up a small hill and looked down the run. At close to 4 p.m., it was still untracked.

It was only a few hundred feet, but I'll take a short shot of untracked powder over 1,500 vertical feet of hard bumps anytime. We enjoyed it so much, in fact, that we hightailed back to the lift to sneak in another run before it closed for the day.

No, the ride back up wasn't speedy. But when you're skiing fresh snow at 4 o'clock, there's really no reason to rush.

Hannah Nordhaus covers the outdoors and the environment from her home in Boulder.

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