Eldora, CO 1-9-16

EMSC

Well-known member
Crowds

Crazy busy at Eldora today. We decided to go up on the early side shooting to arrive at 9a when the lifts officially open. Instead at 9am we came to a standstill half way up the shelf road (which is a couple miles long). We barely made it into the main lot but only after crawling up to the parking lots for 15+ minutes. That's more early am traffic than I've ever seen. No idea if they started turning away cars or not. They at least have a deal with the school district to park employees at the middle/high school a mile past the start of Shelf road. On the other hand Eldora generally does a terrible job of parking cars and there are always spots you could find if you can get past the formal parking crew.

Anyway, Eldora had 5" of new snow in 48hrs (only 1/2-1" overnight though) which was pretty close to many of the big I70 resorts. I can only guess the holiday crowding last week for those who went combined with next weekend being MLK meant a lot of folks said "meh, lets just do Eldora today" or something like that. The skiing was mostly pretty soft as there has not been a big wind event for several weeks; the scrapey areas still show by early afternoon, but overall pretty good conditions. We took Jr down several runs he's never done previously including another black diamond. For some reason he was skiing slower than recent weeks today. We seem to be moving toward a new typical with multiple runs then Wife and Jr go in for a break and I take a fast lap on the steeps.

Due to relatively little new snow the past couple of weeks, the steeps are actually getting a bit worse for wear (aka more stumps/rocks showing), though still pretty good for this time of year.

After the break, which I also took for a bit since it was chilly out with constant flurries, we did a couple more laps on the front side before pulling the plug a bit after 2pm. Occasional random wind gusts seemed to be coming up making it feel even colder than when we arrived. Roughly 9k of vert by my count. Probably skip the I70 nightmare next week on the holiday weekend and perhaps head back that way in 2 weeks.

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