Day three in Evergreen - Winter Park

As we ate breakfast this morning, we spotted some elk in Annie's backyard! They were so calm... we could walk pretty close to them and they didn't care. We saw more as we drove down Annie's street!

Today was our first day on a big mountain in Colorado! We drove over an hour to get to Winter Park; Shell gas stations have a great deal where if you buy 10 gallons of gas, you get a buy one get one free voucher that can be used at resorts like Winter Park and Copper Mountain. We obviously used this today, since regular lift tickets are almost $100!

Josh decided he wanted to do the bowls at the top left of the photo below, so we took a few lifts and a few trails to get over to that area... and then learned that the whole area was closed! Josh and Vidak accidentally missed the turn for the blue we were going down and instead found themselves at the top of a black run covered with moguls... oops!

We decided to head over to the right of the photo below since there was a nice looking area with greens and blues for me and blues and blacks for Josh and Vidak. We took yet another terrible trail over to that lift... only to learn that the area over there was closed as well! As you can see from the image below, a lot of the mountain was closed :(

To add to that, it was also incredibly windy (probably the reason that the lifts were closed). Any powder snow had blown off, leaving hard ice underneath... the best runs were protected by trees, and those runs still had some soft snow. Josh and Vidak went off on their own as I skied by myself for a while. I made it back to the lodge and ordered hot chocolate for everyone, since were all pretty exhausted when the day was over!

We left Winter Park and got pizza for dinner on the way back to Annie's. Everyone was pretty tired so we went to bed not long after getting back to her house.

Josh's high for the day was pizza for dinner because it was very filling and delicious after a slightly disappointing day, and my high was seeing Josh and Vidak act very goofy at Winter Park. Josh's low was how windy it was on the mountain! My low was that I didn't really enjoy the snowboarding at Winter Park... I was very sick of the trails by the end of the day :( Josh and I shared the same "ho"... Vidak was so funny when we told him what après-ski means, especially since the place that apparently had the "best" après-ski was mostly empty!