Unexcused Absences Beaver Creek - It's a Wrap (he said)

Beaver Creek – It’s a Wrap (he said)

by Kent 20 Mar 2015

It’s hard to believe, but we recently completed our fifth straight ski season living and working at Beaver Creek, home to the industry’s most expensive lift ticket ($159). This year was completely the same, yet totally different.

Beaver Creek has hosted the World Ski Championships three times

The “sameness” includes working in the same departments (ski school and race operations) and doing the Monday Race Series and seeing all our usual friends (Greg & Susan, Guy, Praz, Megan, Elizabeth & Mike, Audri & Dimitri, Sean and Kevin) and shopping at City Market and visiting Crazy Mountain Brewery and living in Avon without a car. The difference was of course that Beaver Creek hosted the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships, as reported earlier. And I checked off my personal goals for the season of skiing 50 days straight without interruption (actually got 51) and 750,000 vertical feet (actually got 822,382).

This season’s numbers on the left, lifetime numbers on the right

But beyond the numbers, some really cool stuff happened this season. We met new friends (Jay, from the Korea 2018 Olympic Organizing Committee, and Jen and Geoff, a lawyer and artist trying out the ski bum life, and Steve and Sherri, refugees from Silicon Valley – Apple, Aldus/Adobe and Norton Utilities – who live in a gorgeous home in Vail). We had a chance to ski Beaver Creek’s “White Glove First Tracks” not once, but twice (courtesy of Heather’s ski school clients one day and our friend Megan who works for Guest Services another day). This is a program where wealthy people pay even more money ($125 on top of the $159 lift ticket) to load the lift an extra half hour early, ski for an hour in Larkspur Bowl, then retire to Beano’s Cabin for a light breakfast and hot chocolate. Both our days just happened to be powder days, as if first tracks on groomers isn’t good enough.

First tracks in Larkspur Bowl

We also pulled in a substantial haul of logo gear from the Championships. As mentioned in the previous post, I traded my 2015 jacket for an awesome Colmar French Ski Team jacket, but we also collected hats, goggles, shirts, sweaters, gate panels, sweatshirts, mugs, water bottles, posters, a complete ski outfit, and the big stadium banner (which we’ve already hung on the wall at the weekend house).

Partial inventory of our haul of free stuff from the World Ski Championships

The best gift of all was from Mother Nature. She mostly held off with the snowfall during the Championships, then opened the heavens for 13 out of 17 days immediately following. Working a race is doubly bad when it snows, because we have to a) spend the day shoveling snow off the course, and b) do so while mad that we can’t be out skiing the fresh snow. So other than one day (Feb 5), when we shoveled for several hours in a valiant but ultimately doomed effort to prepare the track for the ladies’ Super G race, we had a blissfully snow-free race fortnight. And she really smiled on us at the end of our season, because we woke up on our final day to a full foot of fresh snow. To put that in perspective, the total snowfall through the end of the season, after our departure early March, was only about one and a half feet. Someone was really looking out for us.

Screenshot of the Beav’s snowfall history, courtesy of OpenSnow.com

And speaking of fresh snow, on our second-to-last day (March 3), after our White Glove First Tracks and our Beano’s Cabin mini-breakfast, three of us headed over to the Stone Creek Chutes to see what was cooking there. We found some nice deep snow, quite a bit more than the reported 7 inches, so we lapped the Chutes a few times before lunch. Such an amazing almost-end to the season. Our final day, March 4, we actually skied in Vail with our friend Praz as our personal tour guide. We gave the back bowls a good workout and he knew enough secret spots that we were still skiing deep powder after lunch.

Taking my French Ski Team jacket for a cruise in the Stone Creek Chutes

So that wraps up our fifth season at The Beav. We are so glad we did this while (somewhat) young. We both agree that it’s something we should have done in our 20’s, but maybe it’s even better doing it in our 40’s – we don’t have to live in poverty, packed four to a room with a bunch of pot-smoking dropouts, and I suspect we appreciate it more at this mid-life stage. We are more than a touch misty-eyed about this season in particular, because we will be taking a year off from skiing and hope to spend the winter of 2016 in the… well, stay tuned, I’ll share all the details soon.