Powder at Vail

One of the things I really wanted to do while I was in Colorado was to ski Vail on a big powder day. For each of the four days I had been to Vail this year, the snow has not been great. The snow in the legendary back bowls in particular has sucked each of those times. I've figured out that you need to hit the back bowls on the day of the storm, or the day afterwards to get good snow. The bowls all face South, so even one sunny day after a storm ruins the snow. It becomes crusty and icy very rapidly. For the last month, I've been waiting for a powder day so I could ski Vail. Last night and this morning, Vail was forecasted to get a lot of snow, although these forecasts are rarely correct. I got up early to find out what the snow totals were. Breckenridge reports snowfall at 5am and reported 8" of new snow. Vail is supposed to report at 6:30am. I looked at the website and called their snow report telephone number and got yesterdays report. Around 7:10am the telephone recording changed to today's report. Vail got 5" of snow overnight. I decided to take a chance and head over there anyway. This, after all, may be the only powder day I can get at Vail. Because of the late start and poor driving conditions, I didn't get on the hill until about 9am. I headed for the back bowls immediately. I was delighted to find that not only were the runs uncrowded, but there was far more than 5" of snow in the back bowls. I did a few runs in the Sun Down bowl and got fresh tracks every time. The skiing was spectacular. The Sun Down bowl is the western most bowl at Vail. I began working my way to the East to check out the other bowls. The Sun Up bowl was pretty nice although a bit more crowded. The Tea Cup and China bowls were not very good, because there were big icy moguls under the new snow. I headed to the Inner Mongolia bowl hoping for fewer tracks. I was rewarded with a long run through nearly untracked powder. The runs that I was doing a Vail were unlike any powder runs I had ever skied before. The main difference was the length of the runs. At Breckenridge and other resorts, if you know the right spots, you can get great powder, but it is generally a pretty short section with good snow (maybe 10-15 turns). At Vail, the entire run is powder. The back bowls have 1500-2000' of vert and you can ski powder runs nearly the entire way. Siberia bowl was also spectacular. After lunch I spent some time in Blue Sky Basin. The snow was good back there as well, but it is hard to have fun skiing in the trees when you know you could be skiing the wide open terrain of the back bowls. I spent most of the afternoon lapping Siberia bowls and the Inner and Outer Mongolia bowls. All of the runs had great snow all day long. I guess very few people are willing to venture out into those bowls. It snowed most of the day and I would guess that the back bowls had a foot of snow or more by the end of the day. This was probably the best powder day of my life. It was not the deepest snow I had every skied in, nor did I have the best single runs of my life, it was just the most consistent and uncrowded powder day I have had in recent memory. I skied powder all day long and the snow on the last run was as good as the snow on the first run. On the very last run of the day in the back bowls I hiked about 5 minutes up a ridge in the Siberia Bowl and aired off a 10' cornice into an untracked powder field. I wish I had someone there to take a movie of it. It was a great way to end a spectacular day. I skied 34,430 vertical feet today and it was mostly powder in the back bowls. This was probably my best day of the season.