spring break recap – the day off

I know what you’re thinking – you need a day off on your spring break?  Yes, friends, when you travel like we do and then ski for two days and you happen to be thirty seven – you NEED a day off.  Thursday was ours to relax before we hit the slopes again on Friday and then piled into vans and SUV’s for the long ride home.

What I remember of Frontier Ranch from my own high school experience (back in the days of yore) was that it was always blanketed in snow when we came to stay and ski.  It shocked me a little bit this year for it to be completely dry when we pulled in.  It hasn’t been a snowy winter, we were told.  Oh, but how things change.  Thursday morning we woke up to this, as soon as we stepped out of our little lodge, Chisca:

We decided that certainly a morning like this – dusted in a fresh blanket of snow, with no schedule on the horizon and the place to ourselves, deserved a late breakfast and a little homegrown adventure.  The kids all ran out a grabbed a sled we carted from home and went sledding.  Down some stairs.  You think I’m kidding, but no.  We’re from Arkansas.

I missed most of the action, as I got stuck in the lobby, trying to work the hardest puzzle in the entire world, which had about 300 pieces and was shaped like a pizza.  I know it doesn’t sound hard, but you ask anyone that was there – that thing was a KILLER.  Perhaps the altitude was affecting our brains.  Anyway – those are the stairs (by the way, that would be the store behind that very cute snowboarding dude), which was the starting point for the amazing sled run which would end in 360′s.  Much like something else did later that day.  Do you hear that kids?  That’s called foreshadowing…

After all that, it was time for a little of this…

There’s really no way to do justice to the heated pool and hot tub.  It’s not so much the actual tub and pool themselves (although they are gorgeous); it’s that they are positioned on the SIDE OF A MOUNTAIN.  Literally, you can be in that hot tub and see out over the valley below.  Behind it all, a sheer cliff rises, on which, during warmer times, I have seen mountain goats, and even a bear.

There’s a slide, too, but they wouldn’t let us use it because of some little thing called Closed For The Winter.

Some of us were in, some of us were out, some of us did a little of both…

It snowed on and off all day.  Crazy flakes. At one point I turned around and this is what I saw:

Finally we started to get hungry, so we dried off, and got ourselves together to head into town.