Explore Colorado / Explore The Outdoors

Powder Research in Breck

Put this meteorologist at a ski resort and she’s game for some powder research!  


For the past four years, I’ve been lucky enough to be invited to the Glen Gerberg Weather and Climate Summit at Breckenridge Ski Resort in Colorado.  It’s a small group of some of the best meteorologist, climatologist, and researchers in the country.  


It’s a met’s dream really – sessions in the morning on everything from research on arctic glaciers melting to the latest in tracking hurricanes then ski…I mean snow research in the afternoons.

While spending a couple of days at this year’s conference, boy did Snow God Ullr deliver on the snow including 17″ in 24 hours and the resort topped out at over 50″ for the week.  On the Monday afternoon of the conference, we got to go out in groups with ski instructors.  I decided to head out with the intermediate group and boy, did we have a ball skiing in the free refills of snow powder.  


It was snowy and windy so instead of heading to Peak 6 (which is one of my favorite spots to ski at Breck), our instructor Jason took us all around Peaks 9 and 8.  It was a treat skiing on a weekday – no lines, no big crowds, moments of runs to yourself (or in our case our group), and dumping snow.  We skied hard for about 3.5 hours.


Some of our snow research was just on the slopes, but Jason made sure we found plenty of powder stashes in the trees.  


I’m still a novice tree skier so took advantage on practicing tree technique in the powder on this outing.


We were having so much fun, it was hard to get us off the slopes.  We were some of the last people on the slopes that day….giggling in the powder and dancing with the mountain gliding down the slopes.

While at the weather summit I also did some live shots for Houston Life, the tv show I host.  Somehow I talked my friend Kristen Stewart, PR for Breckenridge Ski Resort, into doing snow angels live on tv! These pictures captured some of the moments that will forever make me laugh.

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