Ski Season is OPEN in Colorado
Opening Day at A-Basin: The Fiestastravaganza
10/29/2015 – Arapahoe Basin, Colorado.
Ski season in Colorado opened today, and I selflessly went skiing so that I could share the details with you.
You’re welcome.
Opening day is about more than just making turns. It is a celebration of the season to come and of seasons past. It’s a celebration of every ski story you’ve shared with friends over beers or hot chocolate. It is a reawakening of your unused skiing muscles (I refer to mine as “baby necks” – they aren’t strong enough to support me for the first few ski days, maybe I should do more conditioning in the offseason…). The sights, sounds, and smells you’ve missed since hanging up your boots last spring come flooding back with gusto, and will leave your face sore from smiling.
If I can only share one piece of advice, let it be this – Get there EARLY. As most Denver metro area skiers know, beating I-70 traffic takes some guts, and this time it meant getting up before everyone else. I was out the door at an ungodly hour, and ended up with a spot in the 2nd row of the main lot at about 7:00am. 
Not even first row, 2nd row. Geez. A glance toward the chair showed that there was already a sizeable line, and chairs wouldn’t start to spin until 9:00. Rather than wait in the life line, I headed in to the A-Frame to scope the scene. Turns out there was an even longer line for the A-Basin Mug Club than there was for the chair. The mugs cost $45 and hang in the bar all season, individually numbered so nobody else gets to drink from your mug, and you get $1 off your drinks, all season.
At the end of the season, you get to take your prized mug home with you. Because there are a limited number of mugs, many seasoned Opening Day veterans skip the jostling for first chair in favor of the jostling for mugs. Based on the line for these coveted mugs at 7:15am on opening day, the A Basin crowd is looking for serious commitment to both skiing and partying, be it in the parking lot or at the 6th Alley Bar (where you can find one of the best Bloody Marys you’ll ever have. My advice: get one with regular vodka and add bacon as a garnish.
After braving the mug line and securing my mug for the season, I walked outside just in time for the countdown to first chair. Cheers and poles clanking ushered in the first chair of the season. I stopped at the car, struggled into my boots, clicked into my early and late season skis – the Kastle XX80 Colby, 80mm underfoot, symmetrical, soft flexing twintips – and skated to the singles line, of which there were 3. The crowd, despite the palpable excitement, was very well behaved and alternated without guidance from the lifties, and in less than 10 minutes, I was on my first chair of the season.
As usual, opening day features limited terrain options, and in this case at A Basin, a single blue run – High Noon – is the only option for the baying crowd of turn-starved snow devotees. Crowding over-excited skiers and snowboarders, of all ability levels, onto a single run, creates a unique and potentially dangerous ski experience. As such, opening day skiing is known as braving the White Ribbon of Death. I’d say it’s like the lovechild of Chinese Downhill and the last hour of an open-bar wedding featuring a really good mariachi band. Stay with me here. Everyone is so excited to be skiing that they approach the slope as though they’ve been training like an Olympian, but their ski legs are about as strong as baby necks, which leads to plenty of close calls and shouts from patrol to slow down. Add the fact that many participants are liberally imbibing either in the bar, their car, or even in the lift line – both discreetly with flasks and blatantly shotgunning Silver Bullets, plus the popularity of wearing costumes, and you get the Opening Day Ski Fiestastravaganza found nowhere else. If you’ve never been to opening day, do yourself a favor and go next season.
Things I Saw at the Opening Day Ski Fiestastravaganza, an Incomplete List:
- Sweat pants used as ski pants
- Sweat shirts used as jackets
- Tracks on The Professor
- Mullets, both genuine and store-bought
- Store-bought mohawk
- Dynafit setups for lift-accessed skiing
- 120+mm powder skis
- Old wooden telemark skis, possibly pulled from someone’s grandparents’ wall, best used as decoration, between 215cm-225cm in length
- Dogs, big dogs, little dogs, fat dogs, skinny dogs, quiet dogs, and one particularly yappy small dog in the car parked next to me
- Beer – in cans, bottles, growlers, cups and mugs. In the bar, in the parking lot at 7:30am, in the liftline all morning
- Bloody Marys, with and without bacon
- Human-sized bacon, human-sized bananas, American flag tights, cycling shorts, fanny packs, jammy packs, Pit Vipers, vintage one-piece ski suits, neon headbands, one pair ear muffs, etc.
- Parents pulling their kids from school for a special day – As a former school teacher, all I can say is…. BRAVO! WELL DONE! May those kiddos never forget the opening day shenanigans and smiles!