By Jim Darby
Whatever your sport – be it surfing, cycling, golf, Morris dancing or, for me, skiing – the days are rare when it all comes together, when the weather is just as you’d wish, your fitness and frame of mind just right, the course and conditions as good as they can be and your equipment perfectly suited. These Goldilocks days are seldom seen.
It’s early February in Colorado. The snow has come down overnight, but the sun is blinking through the wispy winter clouds as we leave our hotel in Aspen aboard a road shuttle for Snowmass – a 20-minute drive to the largest of the four ski fields in the area.
My guide for the day, Erik Obermeyer, is there to greet me with a big smile for the conditions we’ve encountered and the skiing that might lie ahead.
Groomed trails stretching into the distance at Snowmass.
There’s a local lineage here. Erik’s grandfather, Klaus Obermeyer, started skiing at the age of three in the Bavarian Alps where he was born. He moved to Aspen to teach skiing and now, aged 103, still skis Aspen, and swims for an hour a day “to keep everything moving”. A ski centenarian.
Klaus founded the Obermeyer skiwear and fashion label and is credited with creating the stitched ribs you now see in a down jacket. It was more practical than aesthetic – he wanted skiers to be warm and comfortable so they’d spend more time out on the mountain and invest more money in their sport. If he could stop the down falling in a wet clump to the bottom of the jacket, he’d achieve just that. And he did.
Erik Obermeyer shares his grandfather’s love for the mountains, commuting from his home down the valley to teach skiing or snowboarding in the winter and coach mountain bikers in the summer.
Erik Obermeyer on his home ground.Credit: Jim Darby
By the time we take off in Snowmass it’s a glorious day of blue skies and cold snow. The area is vast, but we cover it from one side to the other, from its see-forever alpine heights to its tree-lined creekside bottom.
First up is a run called Longshot. After skiing it for what might be the length of a respectable Australian run, we come upon a little sign nailed to a tree: “you are a quarter the way down”; on we go, enjoying every one of its five kilometres all the way to the Two Creeks base.
We ski long, groomed, snow freeways stretching way into the distance. We ski the steep slopes off the Cirque, at 3813 metres the highest lifted point in Snowmass. “How about we ski some trees?” Obermeyer asks with a smile.
And here’s another Goldilocks moment. The pine trees are spaced just right - close enough together to make it interesting, far enough apart to make the path easy to choose. The snow is deep enough to be thrilling, but so light and dry, it’s almost as though it isn’t there.
Skiing among the trees in Snowmass.
I haven’t given lunch a thought, but all of a sudden we are at a mountain restaurant called Sam’s, where you can take off your boots and wear their slippers if you wish. The windows stretch almost as high as the peaks beyond that they frame. I fuel up on pasta but no wine thanks - there’s more skiing to be done.
Back at it and we find ourselves on runs where one side is groomed and the other side not, so you can ski the fresher snow until your legs threaten industrial action and then let them recover on the easier-going groomed terrain.
All up, according to the run tracker on Aspen’s App, we ski 8090 vertical metres and I have the luxury of skiing it all with someone who knows the terrain backwards and is also better and quicker than me - that’s a slipstream I love being in.
And the last run is as good as the first. We line up at the top to find it wide open and empty of skiers or boarders, massive Colorado peaks soaring away in the distance. I look for my line down, mapping out the first few turns. “Well go on,” says Erik Obermeyer, “it isn’t going to ski itself.”
The ski runs of Snowmass: ‘The last run was as good as the first.’
Jim Darby was a guest of Travelplan Australia, Aspen Ski Co and Colorado Ski Country.
THE DETAILS
THE DETAILS
SKI
Aspen Snowmass is on the Ikon Pass which has some reciprocity with Thredbo and Mount Buller in Australia.See ikonpass.comaspensnowmass.com
TOUR
Snow specialist Travelplan has a variety of Colorado ski packages, including Aspen, with discounted accommodation, lift tickets and airfares. Phone 1300 754 754. See Travelplan.com.au
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