Almost-Night Skiing

When I concocted the fabulous idea of going night skiing tonight, I didn't think things through quite all the way. Such as, it's a week from the first day of Spring and the day is roughly 12 hours long and that it might not actually be dark until nearly 7. But other parts of my plan worked very well. We left our house around 1:30 and didn't hit a smidge of traffic all the way up. We arrived at Keystone just after 3 which allowed us to park in a $25 lot right at the gondola - for free! We did 6 or 7 runs and even played at the snow fort again and it was relatively uncrowded. The snow was pretty skied up and icy, but that's normal for Keystone no matter what the time. Alex and Adam had fun and I found myself going full speed to keep up with Alex. Adam tried out his new poles and had some successes and some failures. Though we would have had fewer failures if Jeremy hadn't picked the first run to be a bumped out blue. Little Adam hung on but it took a while and then we still had to navigate the icy River Run of doom at the bottom.

The biggest disappointment was that it never got real dark. I was envisioning eerily lit runs so dark that you couldn't even make out the trees with picturesque stars overhead. Instead, the best we got was twilight. The last run was almost night skiing, the lights were certainly needed at that point. And then I realized, we missed our chance this year. Daylight savings time starts tonight and that means that when night skiing shuts down at 8:00 tomorrow, it will be as dark as when we left today at 7:00. So, next year we will try again earlier in the season. Maybe for my birthday :)