Winter Park

Today my bf and I decided to hit up Winter Park just to switch things up. We don't get free tickets at Winter Park even though their passes work at Copper and Steamboat too. We get free tickets at Copper, and tickets are $37 at WP and $30 at Steamboat. I think that's dumb, but whatever. We wanted to hit up Winter Park at least once this season.

BIG WASTE OF MONEY. First of all, that place is pretty flat. Second of all, the park sucks. Third of all, the park that looks decent is closed off. Apparently you needed a special pass to be able to access it. We were told that we needed to watch a 2 fucking hour video and then take a test. This made me think... okay... I'm deaf. These kind of videos (videos for tests, orientation videos, corny homemade educational videos, etc) are usually not captioned. (Sidenote: I don't know for sure if the Winter Park videos are, so please tell me if they are.)

How the hell does a deaf person get to obtain this fabled pass to get into the park? I thought of going to the guy on the snowmobile guarding the park's entrance like the black knight on Monty Python and the Holy Grail ("You shall not pass!") sans sword and armor, and asking him if I could be let through. Haha. I mean, I'm deaf, I'm not retarded. I know park etiquette, and I know how to scope out features and bullshit like that. I grew up riding park, and plus the rails and boxes in that park weren't that big, however the jumps were massive hahaha. I've hit bigger shit at Beaver Creek and didn't need a special pass. Alas, I didn't ask him, and I just stuck with riding the shitty parks.

We tried to ride around the mountain and explore it, but after riding on one long flat trail, we decided to just stay in the parks. The only features that were really fun were a rainbow rail and a skinny long flat-down box. The jumps were good too, but they were small. I think I'll stick with Copper.

OH YEAH. The ski lift died while we were on the chair. FUCKING SWEET. A ski patrol came down stopping at each chair to tell people what was up, and I told my boyfriend, "Oh oh I wanna see what he does when I tell him I'm deaf, so don't talk to him!!" Hahahaha. He came to our chair, and started shouting and talking really fast. My boyfriend and I were all like, "HUH?" and signed at him. He looked like he went, "Oh shit!!!!!!!!" and that was when I decided to talk to him haha. He turned out to be cool and was easy to lip read and tried to be as animated as possible. Chairlift generator went out, they have a backup generator and hope to be moving again soon. Sweet. I told him my boyfriend had to shit, and what should we do. He told him to "hold it in"... hahaha. And our knight in shining armor skiied off. The chairlift started moving again with a big cloud of diesel smoke billowing up from the top of the lift. We were stuck on it for probably a good half hour.

Needless to say, I don't think we will be coming back to Winter Park for a loooooooooooong time. We still need to hit up Steamboat this year, my boyfriend's brother owns an empty condo up there and we can totally bring our dogs there!