Do you ski a lot?

It’s not really an important question when things like the war and the campaign trail for the president are going on but an interesting one none the less. How would you judge if you do or not? The amount of outings that you have a year. The amount of vertical feet you ski a year. I’m not totally sure. I was watching a Warren Miller film the other day and they were in Wiegle World in British Columbia. It said that one of the guides skis one million vertical feet a year. So I was thinking that it sounds like a pretty big number. I got out the Suunto X6 HRM that sits on my nightstand because I can’t figure out all the functions and decided to see what I could do.

I usually get a season pass to Snowbird since I get the student rate. I’m on the lift in about 30 minutes after I lock the front door. I like to think that I ski a lot since I have minimal travel time to get some turns in. However I have turned into a full on snow snob and only ski powder days. Which there are a lot of here. I digress. The experiment is to see how likely it is that I can fit 1,000,000 vertical feet skiing into one season. Initially I wanted to see how many vert on an average day I get in.

So I’ve been up about six times this year so far. Most of the time its a 9am to 12 pm window. (after that most of the powder is tracked out) In three hours I have come to the conclusion that I get in about 13,000 to 20,000 vertical feet. Mostly in the range of about 16k-17k. With one exception where I was there till 3 pm because the snow was so epic and got in 27,000 vert. If I average 16.5k a day it would take me 60 days to reach one million. Definitely doable but that would be more than I usually get out.

So in conclusion if you are part of the 1,000,000 vert club you ski a lot! I still think I ski a lot but I don’t think I’m getting into that club soon. As always I pray for snow. All I need is 54 more powder days and I’ll have it.

Written by admin on January 17th, 2008 with no comments.
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