I was really excited to board at Vail. And why wouldn’t I be since Vail is so often described as “Epic”, “Amazing” and a “Big Mountain”?

My first impression of Vail was that it is a skier’s mountain. There were LOTs of catwalks and moguls, which as a snowboarder, I found very annoying. Vail is indeed a very big mountain and because of this, it seemed like 75% of their runs were ungroomed or skier tracked; Practically every run that we went on, regardless of the “groomed” signage, was very bumpy. Vail says that they have “the most groomed terrain on this planet”, but based on my experience, I would have to disagree with that claim.

To me, Vail’s saving grace was the abundance of awesome tree runs and Blue Sky Basin. For great tree runs on the front side of Vail, check out Game Creek Bowl. We spent an entire afternoon in this area!

If it weren’t for Game Creek Bowl, I would tell everybody to skip the front side entirely and go directly to Blue Sky Basin, where it truly is “like nothing on earth”. Riding through fresh untouched pow definitely made me love Vail.

See you next year, Colorado ♥