Powder Day at Vail.

My tele-skiing friends Chris and Renee hauled me around Blue Sky Basin at Vail on Monday and treated me to bowls full of fresh powder, trees and one small cliff. I stuck my landing off the cliff but a few yards after that, my board nosed under a rock and speared what appeared to be some dung. That’s right, poo. I suppose it could have been some mud, but it stuck to the base and nose of the board and when I scraped it off, it had a texture more akin to droppings than soil. I guess if we’re going to share the terrain with Elk, they’re going to share with us, too.

The only thing that makes Vail a little uncomfortable is the stank of the rich. The sidewalks are heated in the village to eliminate plowing and shoveling, parking is $17 for the day (but it is in a multilevel garage), my lunch (a bowl of chowder, cheeseburger and gatorade) cost $23 and many of the trail and peak names are trademarked. We didn’t have any fur coat sitings, but money was still in the air. At the Two Elk lodge (which sits at 11,200 feet), there were scented candles burning in the men’s room and the music pumped through the lodge was big band jazz, more akin to Benny Goodman and Ella Fitzgerald. It was a stunning timber and beam lodge, but walking through, I couldn’t help but feel like I wasn’t a member of Vail’s target demographic.

But, doing laps in Pete’s Bowl™ on my snowboard, I could not have felt more at home.

That’s how I felt after my 25-plus hour odyssey to get to Breckenridge this weekend. My original plan was to arrive by late afternoon on Friday. However, that didn’t work out (see “Note to Alanis”) and I didn’t get to my hotel until 2 am on Saturday. Another 20 minutes were lost looking for the night desk clerk, but then it was smooth sailing and I was asleep, sort of, by 4 am.

I woke up, again, sort of, at 7 to blue skies and a nose full of grief. The altitude, the remnants of my cold and the stank of the rental car combined to completely congest and disorient me. (Never underestimate the power of smell, and if you don’t know what I mean, read “Jitterbug Perfume” by Tom Robbins.) Add fatigue to that and, well, if someone told me I was at Woodstock, I think I would have believed it.

Saturday is lost in a haze. I know I ate, snowboarded for a few hours, made dinner and slept. But there was no edge to the day, no high or low point. At least the photos I took were a little more in focus.