Finished the snowboard season with a personal record
Sunday was the last day of the 2013-2014 season to ski / snowboard at Breckenridge, so I had to get my last runs in. In doing so, I passed 170,000 vertical feet for the season - which is the most I've reached in the four seasons since I returned to Colorado.
Vail Resorts owns (or operates?) a bunch of the mountains out here, as well as some in Utah, California, and a handful overseas. They offer a season pass that allows one to ride on any of their mountains, or select mountains for a select timeframe.
I had the pass for one year when I lived here a while ago, using it to ski. But I wasn't that into it, not like I thought I would be, considering I had tried skiing in Montana and even Snowmass / Aspen years before.
So when I returned in 2010 I bought the pass again, determined to take full advantage of the mountains in the winter. Now in the digital age, the company added a tracking element so one could check a number of stats, gain 'pins,' and share everything via twitter and facebook. What the stats end up doing is making you want to keep doing more, or better.
It should be noted that on a good day, it takes an 1:15-30 to get to Keystone or Breckenridge; maybe another 30 to get to Vail. However since everyone from Denver heads to the mountains on weekends, the drives can be nightmarishly long, especially if the weather is not cooperating. And the return is usually worse.
I've made it up 60 times over the past four winters. Two years ago I took a snowboard lesson and have kept trying to learn and improve, staying strictly on a board rather than back on skis.
Here are my stats, as tracked by EpicMix (vertical feet are measured by the elevation of the chair lifts, not the height of the mountain or distance of a run):
2010-2011: 17 days, 117 chair lifts, 140,170 vertical feet
2011-2012: 10 days, 51 chair lifts, 71,903 vertical feet
2012-2013: 10 days, 53 chair lifts, 73,579 vertical feet
2013:2014: 16 days, 125 chair lifts, 170,075 vertical feet
