Keystone

 Here we are in the middle of April. When I was thinking about this part of the trip before I left I thought it would be late Spring skiing. Warm, sunny, maybe snow that is too soft. Today was one of the coldest days I have experienced skiing this year. When I got to the mountain it was 10 degrees with a 15 mph wind. It "warmed up" to 15 but the wind quickly increased to 30 with higher gusts. A lot of higher gusts. The snow was good with fresh snow from last night on top of what fell yesterday.

Keystone is a good mountain and has some decent terraine but when you compare it to A Basin just down the road or Breakenridge, Vail, Beaver Creak it isnt as good. Keystone is set up well. You park within walking distance of the lifts and it has nice long lifts. No cat walks to move between the three main peaks. You ski down to the next peak and then there are lifts to take you back to the top of the previous peak. The first mountain has a lot of vertical but mostly blue square. I found a little steeper terraine and one woods trail that was pretty good. The second peak, North Peak, had the best trails and snow that I was able to find. While the snow was great you could see that this mountain has less of a base than Breckenridge. Not sure why since the elevations are similar. All in all there is less expert terraine than other mountains in the area. With that said there are a lot of options up higher that I did not ski. You have to hike up for most of it from what I could tell. Too cold, cloudy, snowy to get into it today. The higher you were on the mountain the windier it was as you would expect. Even though the snow is great I would be happy with some warmer weather.

Very few pictures. It was too cold to take my gloves off. My hands and feet were cold without making it worse! Snowed off and on and was cloudy most of the day. The sun did poke out for five minutes which was nice for that five minutes. A few more inches tonight and then warmer, maybe 30, tomorrow. The wind seems to keep cranking however.