At the top of the ski area, there is a long ridge you walk along and drop through access gates into double-blacks at various points. Only one of the gates (Gate D) was open this week but the terrain it accessed was sick! Steep and deep is the only way to describe it, although it was reasonably short. The only problem was the traverse back to the lifts, but you deal with that after those sort of powder runs. And if you're really keen, there are Exit Points to leave the ski area and go backcountry. You're not supposed to leave through any other point. But I didn't actually know about this until late in the week when a patroller caught me coming back to the lift after ducking a rope to go out of bounds. I pleaded ignorance and got away with it - and the run was just amazing. Wide and evenly spaced Aspen trees in snow that had barely been touched since 1 metre of powder had fallen - Damn!

Best in the Country!

Monday morning and they finally got to say what they'd wanted to all season on the snow report - "most snow in the country". That's right, Steamboat had been the best in Colorado all season and finally cracked the big one to make best in the country! As I leave, they have 140 trails open, with only one still closed. Of those trails, I did manage to ride nearly every one. I think there are still 2 open trails that I didn't quite make it to, but they were just traverses out of trees if you got scared so I'm not too worried. It just shows though, in almost a month of riding, I didn't make it to every trail on the mountain. The size of it still blows me away!

The Setup of the town

Steamboat is in the Northwest corner of Colorado, about 3hrs drive from Denver. There are free buses all around town so you don't have to drive anywhere, just wait on any corner and they will arrive to take you to town or the mountain within 30 minutes. Or you can walk, it's only about 2km from the mountain base (with shops, condos, restaurants & bars) to the middle of Steamboat Springs town, where there's pretty much everything else. Steamboat also has the closest airport to any ski area in Colorado; just 20 miles away and you can fly direct from nearly anywhere in the states. All in all, a very convenient little location with everything you could need.

How to Survive for the season

As for living for the season, you shouldn't have a problem! There are so many jobs here and many of them give you free lift tickets (not just on the mountain either). In the local daily paper, there are 4-5 pages of job ads every day - and only 9000 people live here . Admittedly, most of them are crap jobs, but what can you expect if you want to ride every day? My sister rocked into town and within a week had 2 jobs plus offers for more. She's working about 40hrs a week and gets to ride at least half of every day - can't somplain! And I've even met a couple of bosses who say that New Zealanders without visas are the best workers around, if that means anything. The main problem you may have is accommodation , but they are starting to encourage employee housing and you can always find something, just maybe not so cheap.