Beaver Creek for beginners
I returned to Beaver Creek this season, visiting friends who rented a townhouse at Arrowhead for six months. Here are some tips that I garnered.
First, although the altitude is not as high as some Colorado resorts (e.g,. Breckenridge), it is still a killer for most folks who live at sea level. Livestrong.com tells fit runners “It takes your body about three to six weeks to fully acclimate to high altitude” and “Dehydration and acute altitude sickness symptoms are more likely to occur within the first one to two weeks of altitude exposure.” The New York Times reports that “among visitors to Colorado’s Summit County — location of the ski resorts Breckenridge, Copper Mountain, Arapahoe Basin, Loveland and Keystone — 22 percent of those staying at 7,000 to 9,000 feet experienced [acute mountain sickness]”.
I would strongly recommend the following procedure for adjustment:
- Day 1: arrive Denver and sleep in Denver
- Day 2: drive rental car up to the Vail Valley and sleep as low as possible, e.g., at the Westin in downtown Avon (gondola to the lift), or at Arrowhead (a separate mountain that has been integrated into Beaver Creek). These options are at 7,400′ above sea level rather than 8,100′ in Beaver Creek or at the Bachelor Gulch Ritz.
- Day 3: snowshoe from Bachelor Gulch ($40, leaves at 10:30 am) or poke around the various towns.
- Day 4: ski, but try to stay on the lower part of the mountains
If you’re a beginner by Western standards (maybe doing the blue “intermediate” trails in Eastern resorts), look at the Sawbuck trail from Bachelor Gulch (top = 9,560′) and also perhaps Little Brave from Arrowhead (top = 9,100′). By Day 5 or 6 you might be sufficiently adjusted to the altitude that you can do the beginner trails (substantially easier) at the top of the mountain, coming down from 11,400′ to the top of the Centennial gondola (which you’ll ride down) at 10,200′.
Beaver Creek is a bad choice for ski school in my opinion. It takes about one hour to get organized and actually start skiing in the group lessons. Private lessons are ruinously expensive (about $1,000 per day). Take your lessons at a place like Mt. Wachusett in Massachusetts ($90 for a one-hour private lesson; $160 for a two-hour lesson).
[Note that if you are looking for a good beginner resort with lower elevations, Sun Valley, Idaho is a great choice. The base is 5,920′ and the top of the beginner mountain (Dollar) is 6,638′. Whistler in Canada is even better; you’ll sleep at about 2,000′ above sea level! Just hope that it doesn’t rain and turn the mountains into an ice sculpture… See Why do flatlanders go to Colorado to ski when they could go to Whistler instead? Another idea would be to fly to Salt Lake City and sleep there at 4,200′ while commuting to the various resorts that are less than an hour’s drive away. Finally, there is Banff, where the base is about 5400′ above sea level.]
As last year, I met a lot of interesting people here. My award for “best-planned life” goes to an orthopedic surgeon who lives and works locally. Every time the lift starts up it is generating inventory! I met him as he was coming down Arrowhead at 6 pm. How is that possible when the last lift is at 3:30 pm? He and two friends had walked up with skins on their skis. After a one-hour climb from 7,400′ to 9,100′ they skied down the Cresta trail (marked “blue” for intermediate), with the doctor’s faithful Malamute running behind. This fit doctor is in his early 50s and characterizes the Vail Valley as “a full-time adult playground”. If he gets bored with the local mountains he can move to any ski resort in the United States. If he decides that it is time for some sun, he can work at the beach in Hawaii or Florida. (Opposite end of the spectrum: computer nerd. See, for example, this article by a woman who worked at Uber. She spent a year of her life at a company that she hated. When she is the doctor’s age she probably won’t be able to get a job. She will never earn as much as the doctor and she’ll live in places with much higher costs, e.g., for real estate and taxes.)
In the hot tub at the Westin in Avon I met a Long Island dentist and his teenagers. The boy wants to be an engineer so I suggested Olin College of Engineering. The 13-year-old wants to be a divorce litigator. I suggested that she compare state-by-state family law carefully when she graduates and pick a winner-take-all state if she wants to make $800 per hour (Colorado is a bad choice for a litigator, though still oftentimes a reasonable choice for a plaintiff; on the lift we met a Swedish immigrant whose American wife sued him. He got a rude education in the difference between Swedish law and U.S. law! Now he is sorry that he is stuck in the U.S. as a part-time parent while paying more in child support than would the richest father in Sweden.)
A young woman who works at Dick’s Sporting Goods came up from Denver for the day and said that the one great thing about a retail job was that you have some weekdays off to ski the less-crowded slopes. She had previously lived in Salt Lake City and loved the proximity to the ski resorts, but couldn’t make friends. “It’s very cliquey.”
We had dinner with a never-married woman in her late 50s who runs a business here. She never had children and is “looking for a soul-mate.” She recently broke up with a guy because he was “narcissistic”. Asked for an example she cited that she texted him to break up and he responded with “Let’s talk about this when I’m back from this trip.” Why was it narcissistic to respond to a text with a text? “Instead of calling me he wanted to get together on his schedule.” Hearing about Real World Divorce, she objected to the idea of studying the cash incentives of U.S. family law on the grounds that life should be all about feelings and romance. This despite the fact that most of the guys in her age range that she talked about had been sued by divorce plaintiffs and, in some cases, had been the subject of domestic violence allegations and restraining orders as part of the divorce lawsuit. As a business person, could she not see that it would at least make sense to try to live in a jurisdiction where the prevailing family law did not give a spouse (soulmate?) an incentive to file a lawsuit? The answer turned out to be “no.” It was better to go through life in blissful ignorance of everything divorce-, custody-, or child-support-related.
An Argentine college student working in a Vail shop on what was, to her, summer break, said that she liked almost everything about the U.S. except “the Post Office; I’ve never seen anything so inefficient” and “the portion sizes; one piece of pizza is too much for me here while in Argentina I would eat three. What’s wrong with you guys?”
[I surveyed a handful of the foreigners working seasonal jobs here regarding “what would happen if you got pregnant with a Ritz-Carlton guest, went home to give birth, and continued to live in your home country.” Their estimates of the total cash obtainable under the Colorado child support guidelines ranged from $0 to $90,000 ($5,000 per year for 18 years) with $0 being the most popular number. None had any clue that there were U.S. taxpayer-funded workers whose job it would be to get them money. (In fact, foreigners residing in a foreign country are just as entitled to receive child support cash as American citizens residing in the U.S. and the total revenue obtainable would be at least $547,560, a sizable sum in Argentina, for example. Profits would be much larger if the pregnancy occurred with a high-income partner at a ski resort in California or Utah.)]
I was happy to see my friends but I do prefer Sun Valley. The Vail Valley has a lot of the services of a city, e.g., cultural performances, restaurants, Costco, etc. It is a lot livelier than Sun Valley but also people seem to come for shorter stays. The pace is therefore somewhat frenetic by comparison. The slopes aren’t crowded by Eastern standards, but the towns have a Harvard Square-like feel.
[How was the skiing, you ask? As I noted on Facebook, Beaver Creek Ski Patrol watched me coming down a green trail and then set me up with Ron, a semi-retired physician:
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Related:
- Choose a career by working for a season in a ski resort?
- Ski resorts are fat targets for employment litigation?
- How do people mix alcohol and skiing?
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