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The O. Zone: Snow slams Vail, Shiffrin misses mark at Worlds, airline update
Snowy scenes at Beaver Creek on Friday (Beaver Creek Mountain Facebook photo).
What a difference a week makes. Last Saturday (Feb. 8) I wrote how the Eagle River Valley that includes Vail and Beaver Creek was emerging from a prolonged dry spell with a nice weekend storm that had Vail creeping up on 180 cumulative inches of snow so far this season — still lagging behind annual averages.
Since that report last Saturday, Vail has seen more than 40 inches of snow and has rocketed past the 200-inch seasonal mark to 210. About half of that (20 inches) has fallen since Friday morning, when schools were shuttered (a rarity up here in the mountains), highways predictably shut down and an avalanche flipped a vehicle on Loveland Pass. Backcountry conditions are very dicey, according to state officials.
Needless to say, if you can get here, there will be some very good ski and snowboard conditions the remainder of the weekend and into next week, with another storm in the forecast for Sunday.
“As of Saturday morning, storm snow totals are about 10-28 inches. Not much snow fell on Friday night, but Saturday morning will still be soft/deep/powdery, and there should be 3-7+ inches of additional snow that will fall on Saturday and Saturday evening,” according to Opensnow.com meteorologist Joel Gratz. “After that, the next storm will bring snow from Sunday evening through Wednesday.”
With the school cancellation, Battle Mountain High School had to pull the plug on a CHSAA alpine ski race at Keystone that my son was supposed to compete in Friday — likely dodging a travel nightmare as Interstate 70 shut down multiple times in various places, including Vail Pass. The state high school alpine ski championships are set for Thursday and Friday in Aspen.
On a much higher level, local ski-racing heroine Mikaela Shiffrin of Edwards — a 29-year-old who even in recovery from a nasty crash in November manages to win gold medals — just missed setting the new mark for total World Alpine Ski Championship medals in a career on Saturday, finishing fifth in a slalom Saturday in Saalbach, Austria.
Shiffrin was poised for her career 16th World Championship medal sitting in third after the first run of slalom but wound up just off the podium, according to the Associated Press:
“Swiss skier Camille Rast has won the women’s slalom at the Alpine world championships. Mikaela Shiffrin finished fifth and missed out on what would have been the American’s record-setting 16th career medal from the worlds. She shares the best mark with German skier Christl Cranz, who won 15 medals in the 1930s. Rast held on to her first-run lead to beat her Swiss teammate and silver medalist Wendy Holdener by 0.46 seconds. Katharina Liensberger of Austria was 1.32 seconds behind in third and took bronze. Lienberger edged out Paula Moltzan for bronze by two-hundredths of a second. The American had won bronze in giant slalom on Thursday.”
Seems like yesterday, but it was 10 years ago when a 19-year-old Shiffrin won a world championship gold medal on her home mountain of Beaver Creek when we last hosted the World Championships. She now owns a whopping eight gold medals at Worlds after recently winning the first-ever combined event with downhill champion Breezy Johnson.
Shiffrin, as always, is to be admired for speaking so openly about the mental health side of the sport, pulling out of the giant slalom at these Worlds owing to her lingering PTSD from that crash that injured her so badly in Vermont in November.
She’ll have another shot at the Worlds overall medal mark in 2027, more Olympic glory in Italy in 2026, and just next weekend her record-extending and absolutely astounding 100th regular-season World Cup win in a slalom at Sestriere, Italy, where I spent way too much time in local bars during the now-so-distant 2006 Torino Olympic Games.
Finally, I wrote this week about the high price of a direct flight from Eagle County Regional Airport (EGE) to Seattle during our local public school midwinter break the final week of February. Several of you reached out to let me know the best way to avoid the I-70 to Denver International Airport (DIA) nightmare may be to simply fly EGE to DIA.
Very low fares to Denver are available now on Frontier, and one reader pointed out that it is often cheaper to book international flights on United Airlines by flying United out of EGE and connecting through DIA to destinations from Tokyo to London. Good to know.
Editor’s note: The O. Zone is a recurring opinion column by RealVail.com publisher David O. Williams. Please read how you can help support this site by considering a donation or signing up for news alerts … or both.
David O. Williams
Latest posts by David O. Williams (see all)
- The O. Zone: Snow slams Vail, Shiffrin misses mark at Worlds, airline update - February 15, 2025
- The O. Zone: Locals get gouged again as ‘low-fare’ airlines target school breaks - February 13, 2025
- The O. Zone: Strong storms incoming, Shiffrin GS PTSD, Powder to the People - February 10, 2025
