Grays On Trays

If you’re on a ski vacation in a town that offers a bus service to the slopes, you put your gear on in the hotel room. But what if you drive?

You’ll have to drive in street shoes, most likely, and swap them out for boots once you arrive. You could carry your boots to the chalet and change there. You might be able to change while sitting inside your vehicle, if there’s enough space.

Or you could put an old folding chair in the trunk.

Then you’ve got a stable platform for sitting on, and changing into your boots. During mud season, you might wish to set the chair on a piece of cardboard.

GraysOnTrays.com has a directory of North American ski and snowboard resorts. It lists most if not all places with a web presence, sometimes giving a snapshot from Google Earth so that you can see where the places are in relationship to each other.

But here’s a tool that may be even better: the Ski Bonk directory. (Here’s a look at Colorado.) It uses Google Maps to give you a map of a given state, with icons representing some lift-served terrain. It even gives, for each area, snow conditions and the number of lifts open. Click on the icon to get even more goodies, such as trail maps and a weather forecast.

The About page says the service is “a mashup of SnoCountry, OnTheSnow, Weather Underground, the National Weather Service, and several other data feeds to provide a graphical view of worldwide skiing conditions on a Google map.”

The service appears to use your Internet address to provide the default map, but you can type in the name of a state, city, or even a ski area. (Be sure to put the name of the resort in the appropriate box, or you’ll get invalid results.)

Try it out!

You’re in an airport, waiting a connecting flight to your final destination, which is an airport near a major ski and snowboard destination. It could be Aspen. It could be Jackson Hole. It could be Reno. Wherever it is, you’d like to know if flights are getting into and out of that last airport. What do you do?

If you’ve got a web-enabled device such as a laptop computer with you, head to the flight-tracking web site FlightAware. This site has several features, including one that lets you see recent traffic into and out of any airport.

For example, check out the most recent record for Aspen or Reno.

If you’re a private pilot (or just an aviation geek), you can also get other information such as a Google Earth image, information about FBOs, and a weather history for the last several hours.

Face it, snowboarding can be expensive, especially if you travel to a destination resort.

So what can you do to save a few bucks? One thing you could do is make your own lunch.

Peanut butter is a good standby.

You could pack a small jar in your luggage, or buy one at your destination. Slather some on crackers (such as Triskets or Wheat Thins) and put them in a sandwich bag, and you’ve got bite-sized energy sources that you can eat while on the lift. (In this case, use creamy; it’s hard to get two crackers to stick together if you use crunch.)

If you make a sandwich and put it in a pocket of your jacket, it can be smashed pretty quickly. A better alternative is the pita pocket, which is a stiffer form of bread.

If peanut butter isn’t your idea of a great lunch, use dinner leftovers. Most restaurant meals are supercalorific, even for snowboarders. Save some of your meal and stuff it in the pita when you get back to the hotel or lodge. Take the pita out with you the next day.

Even if the pita approach doesn’t entirely replace your on-mountain lunch, it should reduce the amount of food you’ll need to buy at inflated prices.

Someone recently left a comment on another blog post. The entry has a spammish feel to it in that it encourages readers to click through to a vendor’s web site “with good deals,” or words to that effect.

But I let it go because it actually has some useful information. Christy Sports has a “snow reports” feature. OK, so many sites do. But what I like about this feature is that it offers clickable Google Maps for each state that you pick. Ever wonder where Vail is in relationship to Aspen? Click on the Colorado map and drill down to the pin marks on the map.

By the way, the Grays On Trays site has its own directory of ski areas (snow reports not available). You can use it to get an overview of a state through JPG files taken from Google Earth images. The upside is that it actually names each resort. The downside is that unlike the Christie site, it doesn’t have a road map. The Christie side has the reverse weakness: the road map is there but you need to click on each pin to find out what resort it represents.

At dinner the other night we got into a discussion of “ski hard, party hard.”

I don’t understand how people can ski or ride all day, especially at high elevations, stay up late at night drinking booze (which compounds the problems of dehydration), and then getting up early the next day for another trip to the mountain. But some people can do it.

One school of thought is that you can do the long-day, long-night routine if you start skiing or riding at an early age. Perhaps. But whatever the truth is, don’t ski or ride intoxicated. It’s dangerous enough to yourself, which would be fine if that’s as far as it went. But usually it will increase your likelihood of endangering others.

Finally, I’ve spent the last day driving to snow in the 2005-06 season. The good news? Now I have a clean car.

When I got home, I unpacked the car. Then I cleaned it up. Though my car is not a rolling trash can, there were signs of a ski season around: the back of a lift ticket; a trail map; a spare set of gloves. It all went. Out.

Also out: the parking lot mud that had dried into dirt, scattered throughout the trunk. The floor mats came out for a cleaning. It was odd to be carrying snow gear into the house while the Masters tournament was airing on the television.

Oh yes. It’s time to store those golf clubs in the car now.

A short time ago, a FedEx delivery guy dropped off the last of my gear from the trip out West. What a great service.

Since I was going to use both skis and a board, I had a lot of stuff to transport out there: a briefcase (with computer), a large suitcase, skis, ski boots, a board, and boarding boots.

Thanks to my boarding bag, all my boarding stuff fit into one package. A second package was my ski tube. At that point, I would have been over the airline limit, meaning my suitcase would cost me another $50 each way ($100 round trip). That’s assuming that I used my briefcase as a “personal item” and lugged the 15 pound bag of ski boots with me. But I was not going to repeat that painful trek of last year.

So I took checked my snowboarding bag and suitcase on the airplane, and used my briefcase as my carry-on. All manageable. I used FedEx to ship my ski boots (boxed up) and skis (in a hard-shell travel tube) to and from Aspen. Total cost for both items, round trip: $50.

Upside: I got to try out both sports at a minimal transportation cost. I also saved my shoulders from lugging a heavy boot bag around the airport.

Downside: I had to take my ski stuff to a FedEx office on both ends of the trip. Given the value of my time, I might have done just as well to pay the excess baggage fee to the airline. On the other hand, it was nice to not have to deal with so many pieces of luggage at one time.

Today I traveled to Aspen for a few days with family and their long-standing skiing companions. This time out, my trip was more complicated by the fact that I decided to ride as well as ski.

I sent my skis and ski boots ahead of time via FedEx Ground service. It was a smart move, I think. It costs less to ship both items, together, than it would have cost to take just one of them as a piece of excess baggage.

There was a scare for a few minutes this morning, when I looked on the FedEx web site. It looked like my skis would arrive today, but not my boots. Tomorrow is a Saturday, so I would not have my boots for another two days! But a quick call to the 800 number brought me relief: both items were on their way. The web site had not been updated. Sure enough, once I arrived at the hotel, both packages were waiting for me. It was sure nice to not have to carry my ski boot bag as a carry-on item, like last year. Carrying 15 pounds through the airport can get tiring very quickly.

All the snowboarding gear fit into one large bag. That’s one advantage of riding with soft boots: they are light enough and small enough that they easily fit into the bag, along with the board, my goggles, snowboarding gloves, knee pads, and impact shorts. Compared with skiing, though, there is more to take (shorts, pads, and special gloves.)

It took me a couple of hours to unpack everything. To fit the board into bag, I had to partially take apart my bindings, which meant that I had to reassemble them in the hotel room. It’s hard to describe what this was like, so I won’t. If you have seen Flow bindings, you will know what I’m talking about.

Getting a good night’s sleep that first night in the mountains is always hard. It was compounded by the fact that I had to sleep on the couch for the first night. But thanks to some sleeping pills, I got 6 to 7 hours of sleep, which is actually good for a first night.