Colorado Gems Card and Ski Cooper

We escaped yesterday to enjoy life outside the box by going to Ski Cooper. It was a great day. We got to go thanks to the Colorado Gems Card. So I thought it was worth sharing our experiences with both: the Colorado Gems Card and Ski Cooper.

Colorado Gems Card

Finding economic ways to enjoy the mountain slopes can be a challenge. The Colorado Gems Card is a discount card we discovered. For ten dollars it gives quite a bit of adventure on the mountain slopes.
With the card we get two free lift tickets and discounts at nine resorts. Here are some of the details:

Free Lift Tickets

• Monarch Mountain
• Ski Cooper

Discount Lift Tickets

• Arapahoe Basin
• Echo Mountain
• Eldora Mountain Resort
• Loveland Ski Area
• Monarch Mountain
• Powderhorn Resort
• Ski Cooper
• SolVista Basin
• Sunlight Mountain Resort

While there are restrictions on the free tickets and the discounts the card still packs a ton of value in for only ten dollars. We used the free passes for Ski Cooper and already saved $32. That’s awesome.

If you have some flexibility on when you go and are interested in exploring some different resorts around Colorado, checkout the Colorado Gems Card.

Ski Cooper

We had never been to the resort. Driving from Colorado Springs to the resort situated in Leadville, CO gave us the opportunity to drive highway 24 through Buena Vista. Although the morning was one of those rare cloudy Colorado days, the drive was still very beautiful. For part of the drive we got to snake alongside the Arkansas River – truly wonderful countryside.

My wife has joined the rest of our family by abandoning sticks and choosing a board. It has been fun to help her learn and see her enjoying a new sport where she can actually stay warm outside. We had been going to Keystone Resort and we found that there isn’t a good step after the bunny hills. At Keystone the next step run seems to be Schoolmarm which has some perfect areas, but is plagued by terrible flat sections. We hoped to find training runs for her at Ski Cooper and we did.

We spent most of the day on a run called “Molly Mayfield”. From the trail map you can see that this run is a nice green that follows on of the chairs. It has some varied slope, but was wide and covered with groomed powder. It really was a perfect run for her to work on learning to snowboard.

For me the run had enough slope that I was continually finding little bumps to jib on and I would duck in an out of the trees. The edges of the run also had some powder that wasn’t groomed giving me more bumps to play on. Spending the day doing ollie 360s, front-side and back-side 180s, and pressing the heck out of my skate banana left me smiling.

It was a great day. A great day to enjoy the benefits of the Colorado Gems Card and a wonderful time spent with my wife on the mountains.

Remember, just because we might spend much of our waking hours trapped in a cube doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy life outside the box.