Gotta Love Colorado

Ready, Get Set, Go!

It’s not every day you see the above scene in a major city. Indeed, Denver’s Big Air event marked the first city-based World Cup big air happening in the U.S. Leave it to Denver, the mile-high city and gateway to the Rockies. Dutch rider Rocco Van Straten wooed a crowd of 14,000, taking leap after leap on this giant course to win the Snowboard FIS World Cup last night. You can view coverage of the competition this weekend on NBC.

Denver's Towering 106-Foot High Slope---Why Not?

Colorado boasts a lot of firsts, in fact, especially when it comes to snowsports. This year’s X Games, which began today in Aspen, showcase three events—ski halfpipe and snowboard and ski slopestyle—that will likely become added to the 2014 Winter Olympics. Check out the story in Tuesday’s New York Times. It’s not the first time this has happened and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

I better tell my ski instructor/snowbiking buddy, Dave Valentine, to perfect his skills. Heck, both skiing and cycling are Olympic sports—why not snowbiking?

You can snowbike in Telluride with an instructor—or go out on your own once you’ve gone with an instructor. Contact Telluride Ski & Snowboard School to line up a lesson. I’ve actually taught many snowbike lessons myself; they’re terrific fun and a great equalizer if you have people of different (ski or snowboard) abilities looking to go out and play on the mountain together for a few hours.

Thank you to Oliver Kraus and Tom Kelly, from FIS and U.S. Snowboarding, for the use of the above images.