What do you consider a big ski day?

[S_jenks]

Simple:

Opening bell to closing bell.

[2FUNKY]

Yo, 2F, punch in those emoji numbers, can't follow.

You're much stronger than me, I know. B2B is highly unlikely for me.

Sorry boss, the virus is real. Fixed it!


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[Jason4]

I don’t really have a good answer for the lift served days, my local ski area has slow quads and the skiing/riding is very physical due to both the terrain and the “robust” snow. Probably my highest effort day was 6 Arm laps with a full Hemis lap to close the day down.

A “full” day of touring is 6k+, a big day would be 10k and I’d be tired the next day and want to sleep in and eat. I’m probably overestimating my current abilities, that applied a couple of years ago before I took on a house project and didn’t get out as much as I was before the project started.

[mogul5480]

Simple:

Opening bell to closing bell.

Followed by Happy Hour, then dinner, then close the bars down at 2, then wake up again at 7:30 and do it again. While sleeping on a thin mattress on the floor.

At least that was the S.O.P. 20+ years ago when I was actually capable of big days.

Alternatively, Heavenly Gunbarrel Challenge is a pretty damn big day. Something like 40-50k worth of bumps nonstop for 6 hours in the April sun?

[TAFKALVS]

Like 2funky, chasing the boys bell to bell.

[subtle plague]

Still the same as 15 years ago: crowd's the limit.
8000k+ (communist meters) is a big pow day . Last year Engelberg mid week. Best in 20 years.
I had regular 10k + in the glory days in the early 2000s where you had walk on trams on powder days.
Wildest was 13.5k (45k feet?) at the Krippenstein. Deep and deserted. And an 4m base at the top
5-7k is average.
3-5k is family pow day where I switch with the wife at lunch and she gets the other half of the day.

Ski touring: 1200-1500k plus is big.
800-1200normal.
Anything less is earl season old man fun Touring. Mainly tree laps when it's dumping and resort doesn't make sense for exotic reasons.

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[AmmergauerTele]

I got 52k at Wildcat one spring day on their quad from 9-2. Only reason I quit was to meet my parents later in the day. 5 runs an hour at 2,100 a pop.

[grskier]

Depends on what I'm skiing...

I got 32k' the other day at highlands and only skied a handful of groomers at the end of the day. it wrecked me.

If I were just skiing groomers, 40k is doable right now.

[SILENCER]

Inbounds I don't keep track, I just ski hard and have fun. I feel like keeping tally kinda defeats the purpose and makes me feel like I have to hit some number to be happy. Esp since my day count has slowly dwindled over time and being it here in Front Range CO it's hard to rack up vert being mostly a weekender with all the hordes. I honestly have no idea what my numbers would be. I ski fairly fast. I dunno. It might come down to a big day is "we skied nothing but steep bumps & chutes all day and I'm torched". I don't track/Strava either. I dunno, ha. Maybe you've convinced me to play hooky some weekday and go on a barn burner, see what I could do once.

B/C, I def am aware of what my vert is. But only because that's part of the planning process, schedule, and might have a safety component woven in there. Big days for me are anything north of 4K climbing. I still don't track stats on my days though; this is all off maps, GPS and such.

[stuckathuntermtn]

I thought you were asking what is a good day for big skis, lol.
Everyday!

[toast2266]

Touring: anything over 4k feels like a reasonably big day. Of course, depends if I'm following an established skin track or breaking trail.

Inbounds: varies a lot. Lots of days involve sidecountry excursions that involve some hiking. 15k might be big on those days. For purely lift served, ungroomed skiing, 25k feels like a reasonably big day. For groomed skiing, I'm not really sure. I can't remember the last time I skied all day on groomers. Just doing the math, somewhere around 4 laps / hour for 7 hours is possible. Roughly 2k per lap. So maybe 40-50k would be a decent day of it, with somewhere around 60k being the theoretical maximum at my local hill.

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[rod9301]

I used to ski 40,000 vert on a powder day at squaw. Now with the crowds, maybe 12.

Bc, for me, 5k or 10 hours, but some of it is hiking a couloir

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[thebirdhunter]

A big day in the legendary Little Cottonwood Canyon.
A big storm is forecasted. You just moved to SLC from the bay area so you're a powder skier now and you're going to use one of your ikon days at Alta. You try to get a parking reservation but they're full. No problem Snowbird doesn't require a reservation they want as many people on the mountain as possible so you're GTG. The storm delivers!!! 13" overnight and another 12 is forecasted throughout the day. Road closure is announced the night before. No problem you leave your apartment at 5am to get to the mouth of the canyon to be in front for when the canyon opens. You get a mile and a half from the mouth and traffic is stopped, there's already 500 cars in front of you. Canyon finally opens at 8:30 you start moving at 9. You travel the 7 miles and arrive at the bird and finally find a parking spot in gad valley at 11:30. You boot up. Jimmy is long since gone and Todd G has passed so nothing good is going to open anytime soon. Wilbre, zoom and mid gad are the only lifts running. You look at the brand spanking new wilbre lift, it's running at about 1/4 mile per hour. While you're watching it, it stops because someone fell off the end of the magic carpet. You decide to take zoom, only problem is the lines for wilbre, mid gad and zoom are all inter mingled into one giant cluster fuck and you don't know where the end of the line is. 12:30 you're finally on zoom. You're riding up the chair scoping out that untracked line you're going to shred but you don't see any untracked lines. The locals who moved to SLC last year who you're riding the lift up with told you Little Cloud is about to open. You get off zoom , ski over and look down to Little Cloud and it's not even spinning yet and there's 300 people in line already. You hear P gulch and the tram are about to open so you haul ass down to the brand new tram only to see that it's about a 10 tram wait and the tram is on wind hold because the winds are gusting up to 20 mph on the peak. You look over at the peruvian lift, it's not spinning but there's only 10 people in line. You say sweeeeet!!! This will open soon and I'll get freshies all through P gulch. However you're a newbe and you have no idea that they built the top of the new peruvian lift in an avalanche path and the employees are up there digging out the top shack and unloading ramp by hand. The tram starts running you watch and watch and watch as P gulch gets tracked the fuck out before your eyes. You finally get a few tracked out runs in, you look at your watch and it's 3:40. You're not even tired because you've been standing in lines all day. You decide to do one more to beat the traffic home. You arrive at your car at 4:30 and it's grid lock getting out of the parking lot. You finally make it out of the parking lot and onto the highway at entry 1 at 5:30 only to be stopped in the red snake. 45 minutes later you make it to the merge and all the folks coming from Alta won't let you merge and are pissed because it took them 3 hours to get from Alta to entry 1. You pull into your apartment parking space at 8:45pm. That's a big day in the legendary LCC.

[One (+) Sentence]

Is xxx saying he's ascended 27.6k in a day under his own power?

Meters, not feet...

[XXX-er]

27500 meters would be pretty fucking huge and one those hot Rando atheletes has done it but that ain't us

The idea of the event originally was for average skiers to ride the lifts to ski 18 runs down being the height of Evererst ( yes I know the math is wrong) in one day, Valhalla Pure the BC store would give you a commemorative water bottle in the bar apre ski and it was called the everest challenge

than a local MD/ exercise junky/ favorite son wanted to do it without a chair so he did 27500 feet in 24 hrs entirely alone and we all said wow,

3 months later he had a bike accidnet at WBP and became a quad and we all said wow again

a couple years later the event was concieved ( didnt read the whole link eh ) , to to honor disabled people raise some money and have some fun ( not really) and people got into it to do as a fund raiser, it was called the Extreme Everest Challenge till it petered out

[One (+) Sentence]

27500 meters would be pretty fucking huge and one those hot Rando atheletes has done it but that ain't us

3,000’+ per hour for 24 hours? Crazy to imagine but if you say so…

[toast2266]

3,000’+ per hour for 24 hours? Crazy to imagine but if you say so…

Current record is 24,242 meters (79,534 feet) in 24 hours.

A guy set the 24 hour record at our local hill 6 or 7 years ago. He did a bit over 61,000 feet in 24 hours. He was doing laps on a ~1000 vertical foot groomer - he picked it because it was the right grade, and was fairly consistent without too many changes in the grade. That run has lights on it too, so the resort lit it up for him. I think that record stood for a month or two before some euro guy beat it.

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[cravenmorhead]

Inbounds: yesterday, skiing solo through fairly tight trees all day after a 1' storm, 30k felt pretty big. I expect I could more than double that on groomers without feeling my legs as much, but it's rare that I do long groomer days.

Backcountry: 7k with some bootpacking and trail breaking feels plenty big.

[Benneke10]

Vert numbers are a pretty small component of what constitutes a big ski day. For backcountry, I can get 6k in 3 hours after work on the Emmas or West Porter following a well worn skintrack and skiing mellow terrain. A 3-4k day putting in a skintrack from the car somewhere that doesn't see much ski traffic, perhaps with a flat approach, bootpacking, and/or bushwhacking feels a lot bigger. Even in the resorts, you can get 30k lapping something like Collins, Peruvian or KT22 in an afternoon if there isn't fresh snow or tourist traffic clogging the lift lines, but a day hiking to terrain like Baldy Chutes and East Castle will feel bigger even if there is less vertical.

[The Suit]

The Jackson Hole app can track vertical feet, and there's a leaderboard for those who use it. I have a friend who just turned 70 who is on the leaderboard averaging about 24K feet/day. I skied with him one of those days and it wasn't groomers.

[bodywhomper]

When I used to ski kirkwood as my primary resort, I considered a big day (and the best days) as skiing long untracked inbounds powder runs. That usually meant some quick laps when chair six opened, then either starting to work the traverse into sentinel and palisades bowls or traversing around to the top of chair ten before it started loading, doing some laps on chair ten, and then working the traverse to palisades bowl area. On a big/good day, “working the traverse” meant that you would push the traverse out and break trail into the next untracked subdrainage until you finally got to doodle (the outer sign line). Skiing the palisades bowl took two lift rides to get back to your traverse and timing would depend on snow depth while breaking trail. I feel like an hour round trip was not unusual.

[XXX-er]

3,000’+ per hour for 24 hours? Crazy to imagine but if you say so…

the ultra runner but shitty skier did 27500 in < 13hrs, buddy told me at the time he was maybe top 300 in the world as ultra runners go, so as he went sprinting by me on a blue slope I asked how was he doing ?

Buddy looked at his watch and replied " GREAT 82% OF MAX HEART RATE ! "and so he did that for 13 hrs, he was fueled by 500ml bottles of Hammer perpetuem marked off so he made sure to drink 1/4 of a bottle every 15 min, he would do 6 hr training runs every friday

so buddy was actualy an ultra coach and he had quite a scientific approach, he said it was easier to make an ultra runner out of a just a plain old runner than to make an ultra runner out of a marathon runner becuz of different philosophies

t

[BobMc]

[Cono Este]

One perfect line where I get the goods and don’t fuck anything up.

I’m easy.

[zion zig zag]

For bc I’m also in the 6k is a big day club. I can typically maintain 3-4k day after day for a few once I’m in mid season shape, but 6k requires more rest and food. The one exception is hut trips in Canada…there is something about the mellow skin tracks and the slow, long breaks, all day pace that makes big days there seem easier.

For resort, 12k can seem big if I’m lapping JP on a pow day. Top to bottom runs with no groomed to rest and typically bad/funky conditions in tight trees for the bottom third makes for athletic skiing. Add on to this that I’m usually going as fast and hard as possible to get the powder before it’s gone and 6 laps can be pretty tiring.