Sunday morning we finally took our first trip up into the mountains for a little snowboarding. Early season conditions have left a lot to be desired, but starting Thanksgiving lots of snow had been falling on the slopes. We checked the resorts and found out which had the highest new snow count. The winner was Arapahoe Basin with 16 inches in the past 24 hours and 28 inches in the last 48. We left the house around 9:30, deciding it still wasn’t worth our time to get up too early since very little runs are open anyway.

Well we didn’t arrive in the typical hour and a half that it usually takes, instead we were still driving after four hours. The snow was still falling throughout the drive, and there were reported high winds that closed a few roads around the state and led to a messy situation on I-70. I think we parked the car around 1:30 and quickly headed out to get some runs in. The snow was great, and there was tons of fresh powder, but the wind was really blowing up high causing extreme pain to any exposed skin. We took a ride down each of the open trails and then decided it was time for a little lunch.

Instead of heading back out at A-Basin, we instead headed over to Keystone since they wouldn’t be closing at four when A-Basin closes. I was also hoping that it wouldn’t be as painfully windy, but we soon realized that wasn’t going to be the case. In fact, the temperature was rapidly dropping so it was getting even colder. So we did one run at Keystone and decided to call it a day and head back home.

We knew the trip home wasn’t going to be easy, so we looked online to see what the estimated drive time was. We soon learned the estimate was worse than we had imagined. Cotrip.org was reporting that it would take over two hours to drive the eight miles from our exit up to the Eisenhower tunnel. So we decided to stop at a grocery store, have a coffee, do some shopping, and when we found out that the drive time was then estimated at over three hours we decided to grab some dinner at the Dillon Dam Brewery.

While waiting for a table, we were told that I-70 had been shut down completely at the tunnel. The restaurant was giving out direction to the local rec center that was going to be used to house the stranded travelers. So we waited and finally sat down to eat. Just as we were finishing up our server came to our table and told us that they had re-opened the highway. We quickly finished up and headed down the road and onto I-70. We weren’t moving fast, probably around 20 mph, but at least we were moving. We eventually made it back home just before 11, which made for a very long day. See what we have to go through just to have a little fun on the mountains?