The Vail Pow Day I’ll Remember For The Rest Of My Life

Tidbits

• The pow day I’ll remember for the rest of my life
• What I was not expecting to find in the trees at Vail
• The textbook definition of “free refills”
• The first Rocky Mountain work days of the season
• An important strategic breakthrough

December 2022

Su	M	T	W	Th	F	S
27	28	29	30	12/1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Where In The World Was I?

• Denver, CO
• Vail, CO
• Copper Mountain, CO
• Frisco, CO

Monday’s Last Of Errands

Let’s just say… I’m glad I got these done… You’ll find out why in just a second.

POW DAY BABYYYYYY

I think this video captures it well, but I’ll share more below

I woke up to a couple inches of snow coating the van and 9″ of fresh pow reported at Vail overnight.

It was a no-time-to-do-the-dishes kind of morning.

When I got to the gondola the line was snaking around the rope maze and up the hill. The locals were out in FULL FORCE this morning. There’s absolutely no messing around on a pow day.

Rather than hitting chair 11 on my first run, which usually has fewer people and more space, I stayed on chair 4 and hit the side of Cappuccino.

I was met with beautiful, soft, pillowy turns.

On my way back up chair 4 (important: this is my 2nd chairlift up for the day), as I’m about to get off, I look to the left, and see ski patrol dropping the rope to North Rim. This run is a black diamond, marked as “Extreme Terrain” that has some unmarked cliffs.

I questioned for a second if this was a good idea.

And then absolutely sent it. A rope drop is a very special experience.

The snow was absolutely bananas.

Zero tracks, up to my KNEES. This was the first anyone skied this run for the entire season.

As I slowly tracked my way down trying to avoid any face plants, the rush of “YEEEOOO” and “WOOHOOO”s of stoked skiers and snowboarders came from above.

It was chaos.

People turning right around me.

People sending it off the cliff.

People face planting into the deep powder.

Absolute chaos.

If you’ve experienced a rope drop, you know…

High off adrenaline, I took some more runs before finding what I was not expecting to find.

It was about 10:30am/11am. By now, all the runs were tracked up. I was feeling a little bit of a crash from the morning adrenaline.

I was exploring off of chair 4 when I noticed some fresh powder and some spaced trees between Christmas and Swingsville.

I made my way through the trees, absolutely stunned.

Fresh tracks. Spaced trees. And nobody else here. It was like finding a gold nugget.

Hit with a new rush of adrenaline, I lapped that section over and over and over.

The best part?

Everyone that was packed in the morning gondola line went home.

Zero lift line. Untracked powder. The combination was unbelievable. Borderline unreal.

The stoke was so high that I just kept recording videos. The idea started to enter my mind to edit together them as a DailyV, which is what I ended up doing. It was kinda fun.

(☝️ Me chillin’ with the homies)

At some point, my quads started to give in and I stopped for a lunch break. But what did I do right after?

I went back to the same exact spot wondering if it’d still be there. I was honestly shocked and more importantly, stoked.

Still, untracked, fresh, powdery turns.

I continued to lap until my legs just gave in and I had to tap out for the day.

This day was absolutely incredible.

I was exhausted and completely destroyed the rest of the evening.

A Special Errands Day

I woke up less destroyed than I was expecting.

I decided I’d just take it easy today and head back to Frisco, but on my way, I stopped by Copper Mountain to get just a few runs in, nothing too special.

I made it to Frisco and got some errands done, but these meant something special. I’ll explain in a second.

• Filled up gas
• Filled up propane
• Dumped greywater
• Filled my fresh water

See, last week, I headed home for the weekend to do errands. This week, I didn’t.

This was the first week I decided I’d stay up in the mountains, the first of the season – a special moment.

Rocky Mountain Work Day

I stuck around on Thursday for my first mountain work day. I stopped by Rocky Mountain Coffee Roasters, seemingly the only local coffee shop in town 😄

I spent a good chunk of my session rewatching old videos that I made before I took this leap of faith into van life. I ran into some videos from a difficult time mentally.

I felt inspired as to how I’d help my past self, how I’ve changed since then, and threw together a more value-focused video for this DailyV.

I ended the afternoon at the library deep in Dotcom Secrets by Russell Brunson.

FREE REFILLS ALL DAY

Alas, a new storm approached, so we hit the road back to Vail. This day ended up incredible, but it wasn’t how I was expecting.

Whereas Tuesday was a classic pow day where everything dumped overnight, today, they only reported about 1″ overnight.

But instead…

It dumped all freakin’ day.

And again, nobody showed up.

Zero lift lines, fresh tracks all day.

It got to a point where I’d take a run down.

I’d take the chair back up.

Then I’d take the same run down, and I wouldn’t be able to see my previous tracks.

We call this “free refills” and it’s an extraordinary experience.

I made my way back to the same treeline from Tuesday and continued to be amazed.

Fresh powder, no tracks.

I swear, this run is a sleeper. It’s so good.

After many, many laps, I ventured out to find other trees.

Off chair 2, between Challenge and Look Ma, I ran into an absolute gem.

Unfortunately though, I didn’t ski this how I envisioned. I wasn’t able to turn and ended up just b-lining it down this section. I have a lot of work to do learning how to ski powder in tight areas like this.

I’ll be back to conquer this location.

Today ended up differently. I spent pretty much the whole day skiing in the trees and I took a lot of falls throughout the day. Some were slow, “graceful,” falls where I just lost my balance, but some were more serious.

At one point, I couldn’t turn my ski and rammed my shoulder into a tree trunk.

Another point, I lost an edge and split my legs between another tree, faceplanting into the (soft, pillowy 😊) snow.

This led me to an important lesson related to failure that I described in my DailyV:

As the day reach 2pm/2:30pm, my legs just couldn’t take it anymore and I threw in the towel.

Another absolutely incredible day in the books.

A Breakthrough Emerges

I headed back to Frisco to recover and got another work day in. But this morning, I hit a breakthrough.

I’ll give ya the summary here, but if you want the details, I explain it in more detail in my DailyV

Basically I realized where social media fits into my end-game strategy and where I should be focusing my content and offers.

I realized social media should just be plain marketing.

The goal there is to build an audience so that I drive traffic to my true value, which won’t be hosted on a social media platform.

My core value and offers will be hosted on my website (or my future business’s website(s) – TBD).

The reason being, content I create and host on my website (and thus the resulting income) can be truly detached from my time, whereas growing and maintaining a social media audience (and its resulting income) takes some amount of continual time and effort.

This felt like an important course-correct for me, just a nudge of clarity and focus, allowing me to articulate my “why” better and focus-in more.

I’m grateful for the progress I’ve made and I’m excited for the journey ahead.

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