A Glorious Ski Day at Keystone

Colorado's epic snow season made for still another great ski day -- and something for the suggestion box.


Two friends and I took yesterday off and drove to Keystone for the day. A worthy destination resort in its own right and more so in conjunction with neighboring Breckenridge and Arapahoe Basin (and a bonus of interchangeable lift tickets), Keystone is less than two hours from my door. We arrived before 10:00 and luckily found a close-in space in a very full parking lot.

Keystone just had received four inches of snow -- significant some years but just a dusting during this epic season, when the resort has already . The snow was silky, and not until the end of the day did we encounter any scraped-off spots -- and even then, only on a few vulnerable parts of busy runs and at that, they weren't bad. Places were cover is usually thin or even bare wore a mantle of snow. Temperatures were mild, and there was no wind. Despite the full day lot and the vacationers, we mostly skied Dercum Mountain and a bit on North Peak (above) and never encountered much of a liftline (but then, we didn't head to The Outback either).

Two of use are really enthusiastic season-upon-season skiers, but our friend had only been on skis once in the last 20 years, so we stayed on easy cruisers. She's strong, and she has more endurance and speed than most people who have been off the boards for that long, so we kept going at a pretty good clip. It was a great day to get back into skiing.

As a.m. turned to p.m. and the minute hand kept circling, we realized that we were hungry, so we rode the Outpost Gondola to from the top of Dercum Mountain to North Peak. The liftie told us to take our skis into the gondola car with us, which was a surprised and also awkward. The reason? The old external ski holders on these elegant forest-green cars are too narrow for the flared tails of modern skis, but people try to jam them in anyway. Skis slipped into the wider snowboard slot often fall out. Therefore, the gear gets to ride inside. Here's suggestion #1: a minor retrofitting of the gondola cars with new equipment racks. Considering that Keystone has announced plans to replace the existing six-passenger River Run Gondola (the second on on that line) with a longer, faster state-of-the-art eight-passenger model next year, this fix of the Outpost Gondola is small-potatoes indeed.

At the end of the day, we wanted to make sure that we ended at River Run and not at the Mountain House. Many lower-mountain runs meander, and at a couple of crucial intersections, we weren't quite sure how far down we had come and couldn't tell whether we were on Last Chance or Jackstraw or Schoolmarm or Dercum's Dash or Bear Tree. Suggestion #2: A little more signage near the bottom would be welcome.

I wish that I could take the entire winter off and do nothing but ski. A look at Colorado ski conditions explains why: Mid-mountain base depths range from "only" 31 inches at Echo Mountain, a snow park in exurban Denver, to an astonishing 147 inches at Wolf Creek in southern Colorado -- and that's packed, settled snow. Conditions elsewhere in the ski world have also been outstanding.