Loveland Pass – The mountainside is not soft. It’s 1 a.m. The luminescent rays cast by the full moon this Sunday morning make the icy snow glow and the trees eerily lurid. The mantra this night for a small gaggle of skiers: If you can see, it’s a good time to ski.
“Hey, it’s an adventure,” says Eric Whightman, a 40-year-old skier from Idaho Springs who tries to ski under a full moon at least once a year, even if it means mowing down frozen chunks in late April.
“It’ll be just a little ragged, I’m sure. Icy. It’ll be treacherous,” he says, strapping on his tele boards atop a moon-basked Loveland Pass. “Gotta do it, though. Once a year.”
It’s a hit-and-miss endeavor when it comes to moonlight skiing. A rolling storm can blanket the sky, making downhill travel on snow more like reading Braille. Distractions come hard and fast when gathering gear for a post-midnight turn or two. Sometimes conditions aren’t perfect.
“I’ve been trying to do this all season, and I’ve slacked,” says Marcus Reynolds, a Breckenridge local who was driving home from dinner when he noticed the full moon and cajoled his boys into some midnight turns. “The snowpack is the safest it’s been now. The light is perfect. This is the last one. There are a lot of reasons to get out here tonight.”
When the stars align and the moon’s radiance reveals every tiny undulation in the terrain, it’s so good, it will burn a memory of a lifetime.
The theme at a recent full-moon rally at Loveland Pass was “Remember when.”
As a dozen or so snowboarders and skiers sipped cold beer around a tall bonfire, they spoke of previous full-moon nights, when the turns were perfect and a paradisiacal parking-lot party raged all night. There were cozy fires, generators humming, kegs flowing, shuttles running and musicians in ski boots playing between runs. It’s a similar scene across the state during the five, maybe six full moons that illuminate snowy slopes every year.
This night, the riders scraped down icy slopes as if to tell Mother Nature they were ready when she was.
“Man, it is so good when you get it right on,” says Johnette Toye, a Denver actress who admits she waited too long in the season to meet her annual moonlight mandate.
“It’s kind of a rite of passage,” Toye says, reminiscing with friends over the “wonderful” romp through the moonlit woods on Loveland last season. “You try all the time for that one moonlight run, and when you get it, it’s in your head for life.”
When conditions are not prime on Loveland and the snow groomers at Loveland Valley are working, skiers can drop right off the road and shred manicured slopes down the interstate. But The Valley closed awhile ago, so there’s no escaping the scrape this time.
Jason Blevins can be reached at 303-820-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com.
