First day at Vail Mountain

Our first day in Vail. It snowed overnight so we had about 5"-6" of powder on much of the mountain. We got up bright and early to try to enjoy the fresh powder by taking the gondola up as soon as it opened. The powder was great.

Our friend John who now lives in Denver drove in for the day to hang with us and show us around. We tried to work our way to the back bowls. Boy, that's a real trek from the Lions Head side of the mountain. It took quite a few runs up and down to get there and unfortunately a couple catwalks. Yuck!!!

It was a great time. The bowl in the back are not groomed so they were pretty tough. They were steep and had deep hacked up snow.

The highlight was when we were doing some blue and black runs and for some reason Lily and Mark didn't notice the sign that had a double black diamond on it that said "Caution Cliffs" next to the chute. They were committed and decided to attempt it and somehow they made it. However, at the end of the day Lily found her snowboard was broken. Near the tail a chunk was missing and was delaminating.

Let's see, that's three sets of bindings, three sets of boots and now a second snowboard.

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