Copper Mountain

Today was an abnormal day of skiing for me. For the first time this year (70th day of skiing), I paid for a lift ticket. I went over to Copper Mountain to ski for the day. Copper is owned by Intrawest (they also own Whistler-Blackcomb, Squaw and Mammoth) so I can't ski there for free as an employee of Vail Resorts. I paid $54 for a lift ticket, which is a bit of a discount I get for being an employee of a Colorado ski resort. Copper is pretty close to Breckenridge. As the crow flies it is just on the other side of the Ten Mile range, but the drive is about a half and hour. I got up early and showed up at copper around 8:25am ready to catch the first chair. Once I arrived, I discovered that the lifts do not open until 9:00am on weekdays. When they did open, I rode up and did a couple of cruisers on the lower parts of the mountain. They had a couple of groomed black diamond runs that were really fast and fun. I did a bunch of fast runs before the slopes started getting crowded. It was probably the fastest I have skied all year. I am only planning to spend a single day skiing here this year so I wanted to try to ski as much of the mountain as I could. Copper is similar in size to Breckenridge (2,450 acres vs. 2,200 at Breck). I headed up to a couple of big steep bowls above treeline. Spaulding Bowl was pretty nice at the top. The day was pretty warm in the morning and the snow was nice and soft on the South facing bowl. I took a few runs on the front side and I found a ton of fresh powder in the trees even though it hadn't snowed for three days. After skiing through the Enchanted Forest, I headed for the Copper Bowl, which is the backside of the mountain. The Copper Bowl had a lot of steep chutes (EX) which were accessed via short hikes and traverses along the ridge of the bowl. It was kind of like Alpine Meadows where you can access a lot of fun terrain via short hikes. Copper also offers Snowcat skiing up Tucker Mountain. I thought you had to pay to do the Cat Skiing so I did a really long hike up Tucker Mountain instead. It was actually faster than taking the snowcat because there was a line for the cat and it can only carry 10 people at a time. I felt like a dumbass when I asked a patroller up at the top of Tucker Mountain how much the Snowcat ride costs and he told me it was free. Because the snowcat limits the amount of people going to the top of Tucker Mountain, the snow was excellent on the way down. It was definitely the best run of the day. One other thing that Copper has a lot of is moguls. There are all sorts of Mogul runs for all skill levels. I did one run down the Alpine Chair called Too Much. It was 1800 vertical feet of steep moguls. The run was a lot of fun, but it was tiring. I skied from 9am to 4pm with over 34,000 feet of vert. I got my money's worth today. It was a lot of fun. Copper is a pretty cool resort.