Patrol opened up some more bowl skiing yesterday! Outback and Shagnasty are now open. These wind loaded zones provide some consistent soft turns and fresh reloads. When it’s blowing, it’s snowing. Our terrain options have greatly expanded in the last ten days and we now have all but one lift-served trail opened. Enjoy!

We now have some terrain open in Mirkwood! Our Cat Skiing Guides, the Cat Skiing operators, the ski packing crew and our Ski Patrollers put in a heroic effort to get a piece of Mirkwood prepped over the last few week and opened today. Orcs, Mirkwood Bowl, Mirkwood Trees, and Southbound are now open. With the new snow, there were…

Here are a few pics from yesterday as the next round of snow moved in.

People were loving the 2020-21 opening of the Garfield lift on a beautiful Colorado day. Several of the “Uppers” trails also opened this weekend including Upper No Name, Lobo, Kanonen, Examiner, Ajax and Cleanzer. Enjoy!

After opening on Thanksgiving weekend and only receiving 1″ of snow since then, the last few days have been amazing. We finally returned to a snowy pattern and have received over a foot of snow. We were able to patch things up on our existing network of open trails and add some new ones along with the Garfield Lift. Finally.

Our cat skiing guides and snowcat operators have spent the last week conducting avalanche mitigation work in Mirkwood and out in the MCS terrain. We took advantage of the sunny, warm weather to initiate use of our disruption roller as described in previous blog posts here and in this one. This is a great tool for early season mitigation work…

Here is a photo of moonlight hitting the top of Panorama. This image from our Prism Cam was taken a few days ago around 8pm as the moon was rising above the eastern horizon. Amazing.

We are opening the Breezeway Lift today. Little Mo, Ramble On and Geno’s Meadow will be open. The coverage on these classic cruisers is pretty darn good and Geno’s is still holding some soft skiing. With the potential opening of one other trail on the hill, this gets us to FORTY trails open with FIVE lifts spinning. We all have…

After a long and difficult off-season, the guides and patrollers of Monarch have returned to Mirkwood. As always, there is much work to do to prep this terrain for opening. There will be battles fought with Orcs, the wind will be fierce and at times it will be a total war on snow. Troll’s nose is always a tricky wind…

The logging conducted on Monarch Ridge this fall now has a blanket of snow on it. It looks so different than it did with a dense forest covering the entire ridge. These photos were recently taken from the Breezeway side of the mountain. The more dense areas of trees that remain standing are located in wet areas along the ridgeline.…