XC Skiing the Vista Trail Near Boulder

A tale of two skinny-planks

ski xc training boulder vista flatirons

Feb 08 2011

Vista Trail, Jan 10th - A view of the flatirons from halfway around the 4 mile loop.

The Vista trail is a great addition to my life. I first discovered it a few years ago on a run with a group of super fast ex-XC runners, but until this year I had only used it to connect with other trails for a summer long run.

Now that I’m working a few miles down the road, I’ve started to use it as my winter cross country skiing trail in addition to my summer long run trail. And what a joy it’s been. The trail is a perfect four mile, easy grade option when there is 8-10 inches of snow on the ground; any less than 6 inches and you’re going to be scraping quite a few rocks.

Wooded section of the Vista Trail along the back ridge.

I’ve been to the trail now four times, in two pairs of back-to-back days. I first went in mid January (10th and 11th), once by my lonesome and once with Ryan, Nicole and Arfie. Arfie had the most fun of us all. Then snow melted… and didn’t return until this last weekend, so I took advantage and have now skied the trail alone on Monday (Feb 7th) and with Ryan Tuesday morning (Feb 8th), with plans to ski it again tonight (though tonight will be a much longer version of the trail… taking the long route around).

One cool part about having skied the same trail so many times is comparing the different performances. I had My Tracks, a GPS tracking application for android, running each of the days, and I’ve created a time vs distance plot below.

Time vs distance plot for the Vista Trail.

A few interesting things to note:

  • For the red (1/11) track, I was accompanied by Ryan, Nicole and Arfie. We were all still getting used to the trail, and we took a slightly different route back which required us to climb a bit in the last 400m.
  • For the green (2/8) track, I was accompanied by Ryan. The snow fell the night before and was incredibly deep, requiring us to break trail the entire hour.
  • The yellow (2/7) track was set on a solid base of tracked snow on a day where a speedy lunch-ski was essential.

I hope to improve my performance sometime in the next couple weeks. I’ve just got to hope that the snow sticks around and I can stomach the drive into work (rather than bike… skis don’t fit well on my backpack) a few more times.