"The Kings of Crested Butte"--Project Week 2011, Crested Butte, CO (Day 3)

Today was an interesting day. I didn't get a huge amount of sleep last night, due to the fact that our room was pretty warm. The routine was pretty much the same today as Saturday--I woke up at 8 AM and headed down to breakfast. Fortunately, I was not on breakfast duty this morning, so I was able to get an extra 1/2 hour of sleep. I eventually found the energy to drag myself out of bed and get dressed. We all moved rather slowly this morning, so slowly in fact that we did not leave the hostel until 10 AM. Over breakfast and while getting dressed for the day, we all decided that we should ski as a group today. The two chaperones, David and Dan, did their own stuff, so it was just the seven students on the trip skiing together. We were all pretty exciting about skiing, despite the relatively heavy snow that was falling outside.

Difficulty getting up...

After getting the bus up to the resort, we took care of the obligatory ticket buying and last-minute adjustments, before hitting the lift for our first run of the day. Something that I had never really appreciated before but now appreciate immensely are fast lifts. At Taos, the lifts are ridiculously slow. In Crested Butte, however, the lifts run at a decent pace and we got up the mountain in no time.

Crested Butte (click here for a larger image)

The first run of the day that we did was a pretty hard one. Called Peel, it is rated as a Double Black Diamond. It is straight off the front side of the mountain. It isn't particularly steep, but it is very exposed and it has a large number of sheer cliffs. In fact, I went straight off one of these cliffs, to my slight misfortune (it was quite a hard landing). Nevertheless, it was an excellent warm-up run, but we all felt pretty tired after it!

The day continued with lots of fun runs. In particular, our group skied both "The Headwall" and "The North Face" multiple times. It was pretty epic, to say the least. During our runs down the North Face, we skied in trees most of the time. Despite being steep and tight at times, we had a lot of fun skiing them. The snow quality was particularly good--powder as far as you could see.

Powder!

We stopped briefly for lunch and to warm up. The food on the mountain is really expensive, so we packed our own lunches. It was pretty nice to stop and warm up. By the time we left the cafeteria, it was really starting to snow even more heavily. We shot a couple more runs down some great terrain--mostly in the trees.

The rest of the group stayed out to do some more skiing, while I headed down to do a couple of fast runs by myself and head back to the hostel. Once I got back to the hostel, I needed to unwind and relax. I had a couple of hours to chill before I had to cook dinner. Dinner was lasagna, which was prepared using slightly abnormal ingredients. Nonetheless, we managed to produce a pretty credible lasagna and get everything done. A few more hours relaxing in the hostel rounded out the day.

The hostel...

It was a pretty cool day, all in all. I skied some pretty hard terrain and spent the majority of my day on some of the most challenging terrain I've done. The people in my group are really fun to ski with and we had some great times together. We're all a bit tired though, so it's probably best for me to call it quits before we start feuding! I'll be away from my computer until Friday, so look for a post about Taos on Wednesday, but there won't be any posts until after then.