January Ski Weekend

As a sort of late birthday present, a few of our Wisconsin friends came out and enjoyed a ski weekend with us at Copper Mountain, the resort where we have our season passes. Tim Z. was the first to arrive on Friday afternoon. After dropping off the dog, then picking Tim up from the airport, we headed west through typically terrible Denver traffic - perhaps leaving at 4:30 was a poor decision. Nevertheless, we made it to our hotel by around 7:00 after only having to stop once for snacks and toilets.

As an aside, I saw this picture on the way to picking up Tim at the airport. It’s a little weird living in a city that is this crazy about their football team when that team is not the Packers…

After checking in, we headed downtown Frisco for a burger and a couple of beers. The late shift started after supper when Ethan and Quin watched cable in the hotel room while the adults went to meet Maylee, Steve, and some of their friends in Copper Village for a couple more drinks. All in all, it was a late end to the night, particularly for Tim who came in from the Central time zone that morning. All told, we were sleeping by midnight - including the kids!

The skiing was wonderful. Quin spent the first day in riding school (don’t call it ski school, he is a snowboarder!). The theory was that Jenny and I could do some “serious” skiing while he learned some tips from people that could actually teach him to board. Ethan hung with us for most of the day. It was a pretty good day of skiing all around. The temperature at the bottom of the hill was around 40 degrees Fahrenheit. If not for just a little bit of a wind towards the top, it would have been impeccable conditions!

Ethan has blossomed into a very competent skier. True to his personality, he is good enough to not look dumb, but not adventurous enough to get himself into any troubles, which is very much like how Jenny and I approach skiing. He is young and coordinated enough to get very good at the sport, however, should he choose to do so.

Maylee introduced me to this cool app that tracks your progress throughout the day, so in the interest of social networking, here are the results as tabulated by the app Ski Tracks.

After a grueling day of skiing for old folks like us, we gathered Quin from riding school and met up with the Abholds at their condo for some supper and a couple of beers. That merriment was pretty short lived, however, as we were all pretty beat from so much fresh air and exertion, so the Gradys and Tim went back to our Frisco hotel about 6 miles away and drifted off to sleep somewhere between 8:00 and 9:00 PM.

The next day I had Quinton. I was dreading it a bit since it would mean I couldn’t do exactly what I wanted to do at exactly the time I wanted to do it. Instead, I had to hang out with Quinton while he learned to snowboard. We headed over to the green area near the Union Creek lift because there is a lot of really good, achievable terrain over there, and we had a blast! I realize now how selfish I was behaving, when in fact, this investment in my time to help him get more confident on the hill is even more selfish in the long run. This investment will make a ski buddy for me for years to come! He’s only been out about three times on the hill at this point, and I am completely amazed at how far he’s progressed. He’s very confident on the board. He can pretty much make it do what he wants it to do. It doesn’t always look pretty, but you can see flashes of good form in there. What really amazed me about how Quinton (and remembering back, Ethan did as well) learns is how he doesn’t freak out about anything. I see a lot of adults trying to learn to ski or snowboard, and they just are a lot more tentative and frightened all the time. There were times when Quinton was surrounded by a lot of other skiers and snowboarders, many of which were not confident on the snow, and he just rolled with it. I was a very proud dad on Sunday.