Best Place to Learn to Ice-Climb 2015 | Ouray Ice Park, Ouray | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword
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Best Place to Learn to Ice-Climb

Ouray Ice Park, Ouray

Climbers in Colorado often have to hike for miles to find frozen waterfalls to scale. At the Ouray Ice Park, all they have to do is walk down the street. Located in the southwestern Colorado hamlet of the same name, the manmade Ouray Ice Park features more than 200 ice and mixed routes up the walls of the Uncompahgre Gorge, a steep canyon that cuts right through town. Every January, the park holds the world's best-known ice-climbing festival, a four-day affair whose competition draws some of winter climbing's top athletes. The park is free to the public, though gear rental will still cost you; San Juan Mountain Guides (ourayclimbing.com) teaches lessons for beginners.

Best Terrain Park

Breckenridge

Breckenridge gets its park and pipe up early — in time to host the Dew Tour each December — and keeps the pro-class setup running all season long. Most of the action is accessible from the Peak 8 base area: start in the more moderate Trygve's terrain park, then take Chair 5 up to scope out the bigger features in Park Lane, and watch for thrills and spills on two different triple jump lines and a wide selection of boxes, rails, wall rides and other features. Warmed up? Go big on the four make-it-or-break-it booters and other features in the Freeway terrain park and its 22-foot superpipe, where you'll be joined by more Dew Tour athletes and Olympians than you can shake your GoPro extension pole at.

Readers' choice: A51 Terrain Park, Keystone

Best Halfpipe

Buttermilk

Only a handful of resorts in the world have the equipment needed to build 22-foot superpipes to the specifications required by premier events on the World Snowboard Tour, Association of Freeskiing Professionals World Tour and FIS World Cup. Nobody builds them as well as Snow Park Technologies, the team responsible for the X Games pipe at Buttermilk and the Burton U.S. Open pipe at Vail. Buttermilk's U-ditch is at its best just before and just after the X Games in January, then gets sliced and diced and doubled up into a spine ramp for the Red Bull Double Pipe contest in March. It's a truly humbling experience worth dropping in on, if only to better appreciate precisely how nuts a full-on pro ski or snowboarding competition really is.

Best Double-Diamond Run

Birds of Prey

To follow in the tracks of your 2015 FIS World Ski Championships heroes, head to Beaver Creek and make your way to the 11,440-foot summit, the starting point for the Birds of Prey men's downhill course and, a bit farther down, the Raptor women's downhill course. Stay left on the double-diamond Golden Eagle run to ski the same terrain as the men, or point down Peregrine and Kestrel to get your Lindsey Vonn on. For the full experience, have your friends and family ring cowbells for you as you cruise into Red Tail Stadium before making your way to the new Talons Restaurant for celebratory drinks.

Readers' choice: East Wall, Arapahoe Basin

Best Snowcat Ride

Tucker Mountain Snowcat

The best things in life are free, and at Copper Mountain, rides on the Tucker Mountain Snowcat are free with any lift ticket or season pass. The cat picks up at the base of the Mountain Chief chairlift, Friday through Sunday from 10 a.m. until 1:30 p.m., then dumps you into in-bounds terrain that feels like pure backcountry, including steep chutes and wide-open treeless runs above timberline. Tucker Mountain has been a focus of The 12s, a two-phase high-alpine development plan to expand the resort's offerings on its three peaks above 12,000 feet. The project has also seen the installation of a new T-bar lift on Storm King and the Celebrity Ridge lift, serving Union Peak, Union Meadows, West Ridge and Copper Bowl.

Best Lift Ticket Under $100

Loveland

Lift tickets at many Colorado resorts have blown past the $100 mark and are now well on the way to $200, which makes bailing out before the Eisenhower Tunnel more appealing than ever. Loveland's lift tickets start at $51 in the early season — before most other ski areas in North America are even open — and jump to just $63 during the peak season. Once you've got your lift ticket, it gets even better: Sign a waiver at the lift-ticket office to pick up a free pass for Loveland's Ridge Cat, then catch a ride from near the top of Chair 9 that will take you along the North Ridge and save you from some hiking to get to the goods. The wind blows around quite a bit up there, so you're likely to make fresh tracks even if it hasn't snowed in a while. Drop in on double-diamond runs Tickler, Marmot or Rock Chutes for the best thrills money can't buy.

Best Lift Ticket Under $1,000

Silverton Mountain All-Day Heli-Skiing

Flickr/Bureau of Lane Management

Ready to step up your game? A mere $999 will get you an all-day heli-skiing or snowboarding experience at Silverton Mountain. You'll ride in the same helicopter that's used to blast avalanche chutes in the area, and be shuttled to six runs on the steepest, deepest and highest-elevation terrain of any ski area in the state. If the 2014-2015 season is any indication, you'll want to book your trip — well in advance — for early March, when you just might get a 100-inch storm to help cushion the blow. Just need a taste? Single heli-drops are also available, for $179. And no worries if your gear is better suited to more conventional ski areas: Silverton can rent you K2 Powder Skis or a locally made Venture Snowboard, as well as a full avalanche equipment package.

Best Slopeside Ballin'

Oasis Champagne Bar

Raise a toast to your pow-chasing peers at the Oasis Champagne Bar, a 2,000-pound mobile pop-up bar built on a snowcat trailer. Oasis is run by Sabato Sagaria, director of food and beverage at the Little Nell at Aspen Mountain, who says he wanted to marry food truck chic with Aspen charm to serve caviar and Veuve Clicquot from "secret" locations on the hill. Follow @TheLittleNell on Twitter to help track it down and start poppin' bottles.

Best Early-Season Ski Deal for Kids

A-Basin Loves Kids Days

Kids fourteen and under ski free at Arapahoe Basin from November 30 through December 19, with no purchase necessary and no strings attached. The ski area, better known for its extreme terrain and its base-area party scene, went all out this season to make the place more family-friendly with its new three-story, 7,100-square-foot, $2.3 million Kids Center, as well as a more developed system of beginner runs and family fun zones near the base of the mountain.

Best Season-Pass Deal

Epic Local

As single-day lift-ticket prices have skyrocketed astronomically across Colorado, multi-mountain season-pass prices have actually stayed pretty much the same. That's good news for locals committed to getting up to the hills for more than a couple of days, especially since those passes increasingly offer days at national and international resorts. For the 2014-2015 season, Vail Resorts' $579 Epic Local pass offered unlimited access to Keystone, Breckenridge and Arapahoe Basin locally, as well as Afton Alps in Minnesota and Mount Brighton in Michigan — plus, crucially, ten restricted days at Vail and Beaver Creek, and restricted days at Heavenly, Northstar and Kirkwood in Tahoe and — new this year — Park City in Utah. Planning your adventures during peak-season dates around the holidays? Splurge on the extra $200 for unlimited access to all of the above and some bonus days at a handful of international resorts.

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