Snow Days

Welcome, winter. Your late dawns and chilled breath make me lazy, but I love you nonetheless.
– Terri Guillemets

After one of the more spectacular autumns in recent memory, winter is finally teasing and taunting its way across the high desert, with signs everywhere that the heat is over. Sweaters are out. The smell of wood from chimneys and woodstoves in the air. Baseball is wrapping up its Fall Classic, and the other major sports are truly and fully in swing. While winter sports are a favorite time for fans everywhere, they take on a special meaning in the state of Colorado, where have have probably the finest and most spectacular alpine sports capabilities in the country. Downhill and cross-country skiing, ice skating, ice climbing, snowboarding, even bobsledding and curling are all available here in Colorado.

If you’re more the type to like to watch your winter sports, there will be an incredible slate of skiing and snowboarding events coming around every month all winter long. Next month, Copper Mountain will host the Winter Dew Tour for another amazing year from the Mountain Dew folks. At the end of January, the ever-incredible X Games will be happening up in Aspen, with a three-day lineup of skiing and snowboarding filled with freestyling, slopestyling, and more air than you’d think you could even catch at altitude. February brings the Audi Power of Four Ski Mountaineer Race in Snowmass, which is one of the more unique cross-country skiing events in the country.

If Ice Climbing is more your thing, you can see climbers in Colorado all winter long, but nowhere more spectacular than the Ouray Ice Festival, which happens somewhere around the third week of every January. Some of the world’s most elite ice climbers descend upon and ascend upon Ouray for a weekend of competitions, clinics, and events that could truly amaze you as to what a human body can do.

While we’re just past a Winter Olympics, that doesn’t mean the Olympic athletes aren’t well in training for the next games in three years. The short track skating team, ski jumping team, and free skiing team have all recently competed, and most of the winter sports teams will be at competitions around the area all winter long. Why does that matter, you ask? Well, the primary training center for the U.S. Olympics team is in Colorado Springs, a perfect spot to take advantage of Colorado’s alpine nature and high-altitude advantages.

Even the lower-heart rate events see a lot of winter action in Colorado, where there are events like the Colorado Curling Cup, and the Denver Curling Club is in the thick of it’s seasons, hosting leagues 6-7 nights every week clear until May.

While there’s skating events of every type and size, from ice dancing and competitions to track racing and more, there’s not much on ice more popular in Colorado right now than hockey, due to the sparkly new rings being sported by the reigning Stanley Cup Champion Colorado Avalanche. But hockey is a killer ticket all up and down the front range, from USA Hockey when they are in the Springs to the ever-in-the-thick-of-it DU Pioneers right on up to the Avs affiliate Colorado Eagles up around Fort Collins. If body checks, wrist shots, and icing get your blood boiling, Colorado might be the best place to catch a hockey game in the country.

With all of that, maybe watching it all isn’t your thing. While those snowflakes and late mornings do inspire some hunkering down and snuggling up, this is one of the best times of year to see the season that makes Colorado a real rarity. Strap on some snowshoes, grab a plastic sled, get those skis or snowboards or skates and get thee outside, Colorado. Even if it’s simply to make a snowball or three. I know it’s cold, but there’s a lot of fun out there to be had and seen in these snow days.