Remember last year, when I wrote about an alternative to skiing – snowshoeing – because I was not into spending the money on a ski pass or hurling towards my death down a mountain?

Well, I tried skiing a week after I wrote that post…
and I loved it.

Last March, my sister, her boyfriend, Matthew & I all took skiing and snowboarding lessons. After doing some research on what our most reasonable option for lessons would be, I landed on A-basin, which offers a lesson + rentals for $125/day. To me, that didn’t sound that reasonable, but compared to all our other options, it sure was.

Funny enough, the weekend my sister & her boyfriend were in town was the same weekend multiple avalanches were happening in the mountains. I thought that may be the perfect excuse to get out of skiing, but when I called the resort, they said they were still going to be open.

So, Saturday morning, we left at 6 AM, picked up Santiago’s breakfast burritos along the way and began the drive to A-Basin which should have only taken us about an hour and 20 minutes. However, due to the powder that everyone was eager to shred, the roads were packed. And to make it even worse, the snow from the avalanches was still covering the road to the resort.

Our lesson was at 10 AM but there was no way we, or anyone else on the road, would be able to make that lesson because traffic was at a standstill. I called the resort and they said they literally had to dig a tunnel in the snow for A-basin’s workers to get to the resort. If that’s not the most Colorado thing I’ve ever heard, I don’t know what is…but the good thing was that they said the road should be cleared soon and we could just attend the later lesson at 12.

Thankfully, the road did clear about 30 minutes later and we were on our way again after FIVE HOURS in the car. By the time we got to the resort, we were eager to get out of the car and start our lesson. We grabbed our gear and realized we had about an hour until our lesson began – and there was no way that we were going to wait for that after waiting so long in the car.

So, we went for it. Up the lift to the bunny slope and down the hill. So much easier said than done when it’s your first time on skis…My sister and I excitedly rode up the lift then realized that we didn’t know how to get off it. We had seen in movies that people usually jump off of it (right?), so that’s what we did…and that’s how we both ended up falling on our backs, causing the operator to stop the lift and help us up (while laughing, of course). But it was okay, because we were laughing too.

The sad thing was that we thought that was the hard part. Now, we actually had to go down the hill that seemed a lot steeper from the top. My sister went first, barreled halfway down the hill and took a spill. Because we hadn’t learned how to get up when you fall, she was just rolling around on the ground. So, of course when I went, the same thing happened to me. I didn’t know how to slow down or stop, so my immediate reaction was simply to fall. So I fell. And there we were, rolling around on the group trying to get up. It was quite a sight.

We did finally get up and we tried the hill a couple more times, eventually figuring out how to slow ourselves down (yay!). So, when our lesson finally started, you could say that we were basically experts. Okay not quite, but we at least kinda knew what we were doing. The lesson was helpful, as it taught us basic techniques we could actually apply when we went up the hill again. And we did. Again and again and ultimately, we had a blast.

Matthew and my sister’s boyfriend also had fun snowboarding. So, of course we bought a pass this year. We went for Ikon because that’s what most of our friends went with and we’ve already been up to the mountains nearly 10 times this season – which honestly, totally pays off the $600 we paid for the passes.

So I guess you could say we’ve caught the ski bug.
But honestly, now that we have ski passes, I feel like we’re actually able to fully embrace Colorado’s winters. Now let’s just pray we don’t get too confident and hurt ourselves 🙂