Salt Lake to Breckenridge Opening Day
By Mark Dangler
It had snowed about three and a half feet up in little and big cottonwood canyon, last minute Snowbird decided to open and still I believed it would be a good idea to head out to Colorado for Breckenridge’s opening day. Luke Mitrani, heading out on his six-month road trip of shred, offered me a shotgun spot, I accepted and we were off. We made Lance Armstrong type record time with Luke behind the wheel. Soon we were in colorful Colorado, where there was a simple dusting of snow on the ground, an inch at most and to call the November temps frigid was an understatement. We met up with Jeremy Thompson, Nick Russell, Joe Carter and the Atmosphere Clothing vagabonds.
Western Colorado rest stop.
Breckenridge’s opening day was here. The seemingly endless wait snowboarders endure every year had found an end, November 7th. We tried to get up to the mountain as early as possible because damnit if I’m going to be charged $65 for a lift ticket to get me up a single run of man-made crust I’m going to eat some of Breckenridge’s opening day tradition first; free pancakes and coffee.
The only blizzard Colorado has seen yet this year.
We lapped the one run, no boxes, no rails, but ollies and attempts at catching any little bit of airtime were commonplace. It wasn’t long though before we decided to go head over to Keystone.
Luke, Nick, Teddy and Jeremy stoked to be riding lifts.
By the time we had arrived at Keystone the clouds had grown thick, the snow more icy and the lift lines very long. Keystone did have some features set up, but as can be expected on opening day it was like a zoo in their makeshift park. Some typical mellow early season sessions were going down on an a-frame wall ride, a flat box with a mailbox planted in the middle of it and a down bar. Everyone was getting the feeling back working with front boards and presses.
Jake Black blunt to fakie on the A-Frame
The snow was getting real hard, and things wrapped up around 3pm. This wasn’t ideally the best opening day there could be but all things aside, there’s no feeling like the first day back on hill, riding a lift.
Tags: Breckenridge, Colorado, Jeremy Thompson, Keystone, Luke Mitrani, Nick Russell, Road Trip, Salt Lake City, Snowboard Revolution, Snowboarding, utah
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November 19th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThe seemingly endless wait snowboarders endure every year had found an end, November 7th. We tried to get up to the mountain as early as possible because damnit if I’m going to be charged $65 for a lift ticket to get me up a single run … [...]