The O. Zone: Winter tease, Vonn revival, Birds of Prey blow, more natural snow

Blowing snow at Beaver Creek on Tuesday (Vail Resorts photo).

Vail-area residents woke Monday morning to a blast of overnight snow, and by Wednesday it was 65 degrees and sunny. Forecasters aren’t calling for any more precipitation until the middle of next week, but visions of powder turns are definitely starting to dance through local heads.

For former Vail resident Lindsey Vonn, those visions include icy giant slalom turns at Soelden, Austria, scene of the annual World Cup ski-racing opener this weekend (more on that later).

Despite the quick return to Indian summer, snow guns are blowing at the Beav’ and elsewhere in Colorado (up high and overnight at Arapahoe Basin and Loveland no doubt), lifts are running every day down south (Wolf Creek opened on Tuesday as southern Colorado go most of last weekend’s storm), and Beaver Creek is contemplating its double World Cup week-plus party in early to mid-December.

“Autumn is in the air, and that means winter is not that far behind. We are turning our attention toward snowmaking and course prep for the Stifel Birds of Prey Audi FIS Ski World Cup, Dec. 6-8 for men and Dec. 14-15 for women at Beaver Creek Resort,” Stifel Birds of Prey Chief of Media Tom Horrocks wrote in an email earlier this week. “This historical dual-weekend event will include the first-ever women’s [World Cup] downhill race on the Birds of Prey course, plus live entertainment throughout the 10-day, back-to-back World Cup weekends.”

If the name Horrocks sounds familiar, that’s because I hired Tom as a sports writer at the Vail Daily way back in the day, and he’s parachuting in after Thanksgiving to take over for Tom Boyd, whom I hired as my sports editor when I was editor of the Vail Trail trying to take down the Daily (look how well that went). Horrocks went on to U.S. Ski Team, Killington and other forms of comms glory, and Boyd is now an unopposed Eagle County commissioner-elect.

Back to skiing: Vail doesn’t start spinning its lifts until Friday, Nov. 15 (a little over three weeks from now), followed by Beaver Creek on Wednesday, Nov. 27 (more than a month from now), so there’s plenty of time for more snow to fall.

“The weather for the next six days will be warm and dry, and overnight temperatures will be cold enough for some snowmaking,” Opensnow.com founding meteorologist Joel Gratz wrote Wednesday morning. “The next chance for snow will be around Oct. 29-30 and then again around Nov. 1-2.”

That would be super-helpful for mountain ops crews who cranked on the system on Tuesday and are trying to get Beaver Creek ready for two weekends of speed races that hopefully will include Edwards resident and all-time women’s World Cup leader Mikaela Shiffrin in at least the super-G that’s scheduled for Sunday, Dec. 15.

Shiffrin is sitting on an all-time record 97 World Cup wins but won’t do downhill this season, and the first ever women’s World Cup downhill on Beaver Creek’s Birds of Prey run is set for Saturday, Dec. 14 (could Vonn, now 40 and retired since 2019 with 82 career wins, be eyeing a speed comeback here?).

Vonn nabbed a bronze medal in the only other women’s speed events on the Birds of Prey course at Beaver Creek – the super-G at the 2015 alpine world championships. Shiffrin grabbed gold in the slalom at those very same worlds, but there won’t be any women’s tech events this time around, so fingers crossed she wows us with some super-G. Also, sadly, Shiffrin’s fiancee, Norwegian speedster Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, needs more surgery on a shoulder he injured in a crash last season and therefore is out for this coming season. Maybe he’ll be at the Beav’ in December, cheering on Shiffrin?

There will finally be a men’s tech event (GS) the weekend before the women race at Beaver Creek, as the event that Park City’s Ted Ligety dominated with five wins at the Beav’ makes a return in time for hometown hero River Radamus of Edwards to strut his tech-racing stuff locally. The men’s weekend shapes up like this: downhill on Friday, Dec. 6, super-G on Saturday, Dec. 7, and GS on Sunday, Dec. 8. (yes, that’s right, double the Beers of Prey opportunities).

I know I’ve griped a lot about the lack of men’s tech races in the past, so I’ll take credit for FIS bringing the GS back on Sunday. I’m just Birds of Praying we get lots of early snow but don’t have the huge race-day dumps we saw last season that very unfortunately forced the cancellation of all the local World Cup races.

I’ve also been known to gripe about massive crowds on powder days forcing me deeper and deeper into the trees, but I thought this approach to that problem by Utah’s Powder Mountain was an interesting one. Saturdays in February for passholders only? Interesting.

You know what isn’t interesting? The ridiculous “race” to open first, which Ward ski area in Massachusetts recently “won” again nationally and Wolf Creek “won” this week in Colorado. I’m on the record on this topic; please stop with this nonsense.

Finally, I first skied as a kid at a U.S. Armed Forces Recreation ski area in Germany called Chiemsee (my dad was a career Air Force lawyer), but when we returned to the States my family started skiing Blue Knob, Pa., which is apparently now struggling to exist surrounded by Vail Resorts’ Epic Pass ski hills. My lengthy family ski history has now come full circle.

I find all of this consolidation in the ski industry — with far more affordable multi-resort season passes driving prices down but crowds up — intriguing if not a little frustrating given the Big Tech decimation of newspapers that the DOJ largely ignored until it was too late. I once asked Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser about working in the Justice Department’s anti-trust division when Vail Associates acquired Keystone, Breckenridge and Arapahoe Basin in the 90s. The feds made VA spin off A-Basin because it was too much market share in Colorado (how quaint).

Now Justice is doing the same thing with Alterra trying to acquire A-Basin, and when I asked Weiser about that more recently, he quickly changed the topic to grocery stores – several of which may or may not be impacted locally by this week’s Kroger-Albertsons merger case (including side-by-side City Market and Safeway stores in West Vail).

I can’t predict what will happen in that case, but I can almost guarantee that no matter how the judge rules on this case our groceries will still be sub-par and overpriced. I’d much rather feast on freshies in the backcountry, so bring on the snow-riding season, weather gods.

Editor’s note: The O. Zone is a recurring opinion column by RealVail.com publisher David O. Williams.

Fresh turns Monday at Wolf Creek ski area (Wolf Creek photo).

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David O. Williams

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David O. Williams is the editor and co-founder of RealVail.com and has had his awarding-winning work (see About Us) published in more than 75 newspapers and magazines around the world, including 5280 Magazine, American Way Magazine (American Airlines), the Anchorage Daily News (Alaska), the Anchorage Daily Press (Alaska), Aspen Daily News, Aspen Journalism, the Aspen Times, Beaver Creek Magazine, the Boulder Daily Camera, the Casper Star Tribune (Wyoming), the Chicago Tribune, Colorado Central Magazine, the Colorado Independent (formerly Colorado Confidential), Colorado Newsline, Colorado Politics (formerly the Colorado Statesman), Colorado Public News, the Colorado Springs Gazette, the Colorado Springs Independent, the Colorado Statesman (now Colorado Politics), the Colorado Times Recorder, the Cortez Journal, the Craig Daily Press, the Curry Coastal Pilot (Oregon), the Daily Trail (Vail), the Del Norte Triplicate (California), the Denver Daily News, the Denver Gazette, the Denver Post, the Durango Herald, the Eagle Valley Enterprise, the Eastside Journal (Bellevue, Washington), ESPN.com, Explore Big Sky (Mont.), the Fort Morgan Times (Colorado), the Glenwood Springs Post-Independent, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, the Greeley Tribune, the Huffington Post, the King County Journal (Seattle, Washington), the Kingman Daily Miner (Arizona), KUNC.org (northern Colorado), LA Weekly, the Las Vegas Sun, the Leadville Herald-Democrat, the London Daily Mirror, the Moab Times Independent (Utah), the Montgomery Journal (Maryland), the Montrose Daily Press, The New York Times, the Parent’s Handbook, Peaks Magazine (now Epic Life), People Magazine, Powder Magazine, the Pueblo Chieftain, PT Magazine, the Rio Blanco Herald Times (Colorado), Rocky Mountain Golf Magazine, the Rocky Mountain News, RouteFifty.com (formerly Government Executive State and Local), the Salt Lake Tribune, SKI Magazine, Ski Area Management, SKIING Magazine, the Sky-Hi News, the Steamboat Pilot & Today, the Sterling Journal Advocate (Colorado), the Summit Daily News, United Hemispheres (United Airlines), Vail/Beaver Creek Magazine, Vail en Español, Vail Health Magazine, Vail Valley Magazine, the Vail Daily, the Vail Trail, Westword (Denver), Writers on the Range and the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. Williams is also the founder, publisher and editor of RealVail.com and RockyMountainPost.com.

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