The 6 month winter was almost over, and that meant so was the ski season; so we snuck a cheeky rocky mountains long weekend ski trip in. I didn’t quite understand the reaction I was receiving when I told people we were heading to Aspen. Everyone gave me a fancy ‘la-de-daa’ reaction… but when I got to Aspen I understood why. It did take us longer than expected to get to Aspen though…
We had jetted off with Liz and Mark; a couple of avid skiers and a barrel of fun and laughs to boot. The itinerary had us traveling from LGA to Denver and then a connecting flight from Denver to Aspen. We landed in Denver and the whole group was anxious about getting our connecting flight. We made it though, and by the time we were all in our seats and I was drifting off to sleep, we thought we were well on our way. Not so. Just after the plane had been de-iced, the captain told us the clouds were too low in Aspen and the visibility was far too poor for us to land. So we’re sitting on the plane and everyone starts problem solving. When is the next connecting flight? Do we stay here a night? Or do we take a 5 hour car ride now?
Fast forward around 3 hours, after thinking the airline had lost our skis and constant back and forth around whether to drive through the night or just drive in the morning (as the earliest flight we could get on would be the next night) we found a hotel near the airport and crashed. When we woke up the next morning, we were so relieved we’d made the right move. The roads were a nightmare that night, an avalanche had occurred, setting off a gas explosion that closed part of the road and a truck had rolled over closing the tunnel from Denver to Aspen. People who had decided to drive that night were stuck in their cars overnight waiting for the tunnel to open…it didn’t open until the next morning. Some people from our flight had decided to take an Uber from Denver to Aspen that night – we didn’t like to imagine how much that would have cost them.
The drive ended up being gorgeous and the timing was super lucky for us. At one part we saw some police cars just stop in the middle of the road and get out. We were the few cars to drive right on past. We later heard that they were there setting up to close the road. So we just snuck in, again.
We’d lost a day on the slopes, but it ended up being fine. The day before there was a huge snow storm so by the time we did hit the slopes we had 130inch of fresh snow. We got another 30inc the next night and another 15inch the night after.
We met Liz’s bro, a snowboard instructor and we {thought} we were all dining with Kelly Slater at dinner. After standing up for our fitness abilities and an entire car ride home laughing our guts out, it was time to hit the hay for an early start on Aspen Highlands.
Aspen was gorgeous. The runs were wide, long and beautiful. A bonus was that people knew how to ski (vs when we went to Hunter Mountain). We popped into Cloud 9 for lunch, escaped before we got covered in champagne and tucked away a full afternoon of skiing.
The next day we had beautiful conditions on Snowmass mountain. The blue sky had come out and we were the very first people to make tracks on the run. After being hounded about my skiing abilities, I decided to have some champagne for breakfast which loosened me up and also apparently improved my technique.
We stopped off for lunch with Kym and Sue from Aus, catching up and reminiscing about home before we tucked away another 4 hours of skiing under our belts.
We explored the gorgeous (and expensive) town of Aspen, running into some Salesforce friends at the Red Onion bar – a historic spot that’s been there since 1892.
Satisfied with the conditions we were lucky enough to get and the amount of time on the slopes we had; it was time to head back to NYC. Thankfully, this time, the journey home was seamless compared to the way over.
