>>>>8.5 feet of snow in the last week is nothing to sneeze at. Kirkwood was my favorite. Highway 88 from the central valley would close during big storms, but access from NV was not an issue. Awsome skiing with no lift lines! They don't ever get real powder though.. Just too warm.
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>>>Here's hoping you get the chance to drive to the mountains and cough up the current lift ticket price soon. None of us are getting any younger but there is always muscle memory. As my ski instructor said, don't worry about wiping out or getting hurt and just let those skis run. She said this is weird but you're much safer if you do it that way.
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>>Just coming back from a couple of days in switzerland (a dream of pulver snow last week - each day 20 cm of crunching powder added at minus 18 celsius). Nearly noboby on the slopes as it was pre-season and no lines at the lifts.
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>>Only thing I bemoan is the attempt to turn every run into a broad, well plastered highway - the stretches with buckles and hills are "too dangerous" this day and age...
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>Lucky you!!! (I mean that)
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>One day try "The Plunge" in Telluride, CO....
>I skied Switzerland, Austria, and Germany back in the mid 80s - loved it - the ambiance was so much nicer than the slopes in the U.S., but I actually liked the slopes (for skiing) better in Colorado - it's personal choice I guess.

Ripped from the headlines:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/12/24/western.ski.towns/index.html?hpt=C2

I spent a terrific week at Breckenridge. Four couples, two of us married and two not yet, rented a house right by the slopes. The women had all worked together at GTE. As it turned out it was the end of our child-free, care-free yuppiedom. Many children followed, not that I am complaining. It just turned out to be the marker between one part of our lives and another. We spent the whole time skiing, cooking for each other or going to amiable restaurants, sitting around the fireplace (Terry Quinn, firestarter extraordinaire) making each other laugh. It was a truly fun, blissful week. You look back and think damn, freeze this moment, freeze it right here.

The skiing itself was really nice. It was March, so not icy cold and in fact a lot of us got that raccoon look after unsunblocked afternoon runs. My one treacherous moment was when I woke up early one morning and went off to the lift on my own. (On recommendation we had bought lift tickets at the City Markets, which was in fact a former client, which is a free ski travel tip <g>). I was on a run I had no business being on in the first place and it was icy with the sun not all the way up yet. I let my skis run, just like the ski instructor said, and then I realized I was projectiling down a steep slope of ice at god knows what speed. The outline of a coffin formed in my mind. I remembered another thing the ski instructor said, which was that if you feel seriously in danger, hit the ground. I hit the ground and skidded for who knows how many hundred feet, coming to a stop among trees just off the trail. A ski ranger came by. "You want assistance back to the lodge?" she said. "No," I said. She said I'm just going to ski along with you to the bottom, OK? We did so, slowly. Sometimes you just have to tell your pride to shut up.

No more runs for me until that afternoon. When I got back to the rented house most of the rest were up and about and there was the smell of fresh brewed coffee, sausages, and eggs. And hash browns, which we had been debating amiably all week about how to cook properly. Food and coffee never tasted better.