This is an experiment for a type of piece I see myself writing for benjaminlanin.com pretty regularly next season. It’s my hope that I’ll be working directly with people interested in using skiing to learn flow, so I want to practice writing that explores skiing from a flow perspective
Because it’s been so long since this piece was initially drafted–but I still see value in the exercise–I’m going to annotate the piece to bring it somewhat up to date. Look for bracketed bits in italics. Those parts were written today.
Perhaps surprisingly, this was my first serious day at Breckenridge all season. I’d skied there with some friends and their daughters (ages 5 and 8) just after the new year, but we just puttered around Peak 9 for a few hours and got very cold; and I was at Breck for three days at the end of January for my snowboard certification test, but that was mostly riding Peak 9 on modest terrain, and there was little play and no exploration, so I don’t count any of those as serious mountain days.
Conditions have improved pretty markedly since the end of January. We’re now about a week removed from the last storm, and traffic on the mountain remains heavy, so we’re getting pretty desperate for a refresh.
[It’s now almost two weeks since the day I’m writing about her, and we still haven’t had a storm to refresh conditions. It had stayed cold until yesterday (Sunday, March 11th) but temperatures have gotten quite warm the past two days, and so we’re getting full on into spring conditions. If we don’t get a serious storm soon, the season is going to come to a crashing halt very quickly.]
We did a single lap on Peak 8 to warm up, a simple cruiser on Springmeir, and it was fine. It was a Wednesday in the quiet interstice between President’s Day and spring break, so crowds were light. We debated what to do next, decided to check out Peak 10, and so dropped down Psychopath to E Chair.
From the chair, we could see that the double-diamond terrain below E Chair is basically unskiable. We watched a couple of foolhardy souls attempt it, but we couldn’t imagine that they found much joy on a pitch that was basically devoid of snow. Barring a very snowy March, this terrain is best forgotten for the rest of this season.
A run down Upper Lehman, in the valley between Peak 9 and Peak 10, took us to the Falcon Superchair and up Peak 10.
We had reasonable hope for the groomed terrain on Peak 10 (Crystal, Centennial, Cimarron) because sometimes the trail marking (black rather than blue) keeps some people away, but on this day we found it scraped and icy top to bottom.
Because of that, I decided to explore approaching the terrain a bit differently. I’ve been inculcated sufficiently into PSIA-approved skiing that I generally try to carve on all terrain that’s carveable, but with conditions this icy on slopes as steep as Peak 10’s groomers, I didn’t feel confident that I could trust my edges to hold at speed, so instead I started playing with trying to maintain a sense of balance, control, and above all fun as I explored intentionally skidding my turns. I took a less aggressive stance by allowing my weight to go back a tiny bit and by standing a little taller, and when turning I consciously pivoted my skis beneath me. This is sort of how you see the park kids ski, the kind of skidded turn that looks sharp when it’s done with proper steeze. While steezy skidded turns didn’t turn these hardpack conditions into great fun, I felt more in control and less fearful than I usually would on icy hardpack, so I guess I’d call the experiment a success.
We did a single run down the north-facing bump-run Spitfire. We found coverage thin, especially skier’s right side, while the bumps skier’s left, where the run double-fall-lines into the trees, were of a challenging shape and size, but we managed to find some reasonable flow. On a good snow year, this is one of my favorite bump runs on the mountain, but on this day it was only worth a single run.
After a water/snack break, we decided we’d try going up to Breck’s high-altitude terrain, so we took the SuperConnect and then dropped down to 6 Chair. Any idea that we might include Imperial Bowl in our plans was put to rest as soon as we got a good look at Imperial from 6 Chair. Of all that acreage, there are only a couple of lines holding snow. Most of the terrain on the face is rocked out and genuinely unskiable. Should the weather bring us a series of wet spring storms, there may still be life on this part of the hill yet, but if we get some days of warm temps and serious sun, Imperial will be done for the year. Those dark rocks really retain the heat–a few days in bright sun, and all the remaining snow around them will melt out.
It was off 6 Chair that we found the best runs of the day. We first headed pretty hard skier’s-right over to Too Much and found the snow delightful and the bumps nicely shaped and sized. Runs like Too Much, Solitude, etc., can be iffy. They’re pretty much south-facing, and while at this altitude, just below treeline, temperatures stay colder than lower down the mountain, it doesn’t take a whole lot of warm sun to bake them into unpleasant sheets of ice. But on this day, we found them in solid condition, with the snow kind of chalky, but able to cleanly hold an edge.
Which was really nice, because overall I’d been having a pretty ragged time in the bumps that day. Bumps have been a big focus of mine for the past two seasons, as I try to find my way toward deeper flow on terrain I have in the past tended to struggle on. This season, I’ve reached new levels of flow in the bumps, but I’ve mostly been practicing in the blue bumps, in part because when you’re working on skills, you don’t want to overterrain and make things complicated, and in part because the coverage through so much of the season has been iffy, and it’s harder to find your flow when you want to be focusing on the breath but are simultaneously watching super-intently for exposed rocks so you don’t kill yourself.
But on the snow at Too Much, where I found the coverage adequate and the quality trustworthy, I began to bring the skills I’ve been developing over on the blue bumps into the black. and it was great. My run on Too Much was solid, but it was on the next two–one on Solitude, and then one back under the chair on West Snowbird, inspired by a big group of shredding bump-skiers we watched as we rode the chair that time–that I really hit my flow. I won’t say things were perfect, but they were clearly the best, most in-flow turns I’d ever made on black bumped terrain. I was smooth, kept my skis on the snow and my body committed to the fall-line, and when I lost the flow by thinking, which I did every fourth or fifth turn, I accepted the drop out of flow with equanimity instead of recrimination, re-connected with the breath, and made the next turn. It was really fun.
We rode 6 Chair one more time, this time cutting skier’s-left over to the south side of Horseshoe Bowl, the sections called Stampede and Rustler and Mule on the trail-map, and I practiced that same flow, and the snow there was similar in quality to what we’d found around 6 Chair, and I made some solid, committed turns on the steep terrain of the bowl, was feeling like I was seeing more evidence of the progress I’ve made this year, and had a really good time.
When took a lunch break at Vista Haus, then took the T-Bar up and did another run in Horseshoe Bowl, doing the section called Outlaw, and found it good. We enjoyed the steepness of the terrain.
(By the way, no one I’ve ever met differentiates between different sections of the bowl by name. Horseshoe Bowl is just Horseshoe Bowl.)
From there, we went over to Peak 6, making our Grand Traverse of all five peaks complete. (And yes, this means that we treated Peak 7 as essentially just a transition to Peak 6. It’s often that way, Peak 7 below the bowls mostly being a series of undulating rolling blue cruisers.)
The snow quality on Peak 6 was pretty good, though not as good as what we found on 6 Chair, and it was definitely thin. We skied both Delirium and Euphoria, skier’s right from the chair and through the gates that separate that terrain from Bliss, and it was the fun, varied terrain it usually is, but it paid real dividends to be very careful, because exposed rocks abounded.
We did three total runs on Peak 6, then headed down Monte Cristo to pick up the gondy and call it a day. The snow on Monte Cristo, which has a couple of serious rollers as it makes its way to the bottom, was scraped and icy and it was hard to trust an edge, and so it feels pretty safe to say that if you’re at Breck and you’ve got the skills to ski the higher-mountain terrain, head up there for the good snow and the most fun.
[I’m guessing the high-alpine terrain has really suffered since this was written. Surely it has continued to see high skier traffic, and given the warmth of the past couple of days, it may have crossed over into the realm of icy and unfun.]