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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 somewhere (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 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.
There will, however, finally be a men’s tech event (GS) the weekend before, as the event that Park City’s Ted Ligety dominated with five wins at Beaver Creek, makes a return in time for hometown hero River Radamus of Edwards to strut his 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.
I know I’ve griped a lot about that in the past, so I’ll take credit for FIS bringing the GS back.
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. 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.
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.
I can’t predict what will happen in that case, but I can almost guarantee that no matter how the judge rules our groceries will still be sub-par and overpriced. I’d much rather feast on freshies in the backcountry, so bring on the 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).
David O. Williams
