For my last day of snowboarding in Aspen, I headed to the one remaining mountain, Buttermilk. While generally viewed as the least challenging, it does feature some glades and a large terrain park. It’s also the host of the winter X-Games, which just wrapped up the week before our arrival. The superpipe and jumps are big enough you can see them from the highway, and proved to be quite impressive up close.
Margaret, one of the other boarders on the trip, and I took a few runs in the mini-halfpipe. It stands a modest 6 feet tall in comparison to the 20-foot tall superpipe. The amount of effort it requires just to get to the lip of the little guy really makes you appreciate what it takes for people to get 8 feet above the lip of its big brother.
We did get to see some of the pros in action; the Aspen Open was in progress with both halfpipe and slopestyle competitions to watch. The final big jump of the slopstyle was big enough to have a pickup truck parked behind the kicker with plenty of room to spare.
I contented myself with the smaller features in the terrain park, hitting a few jumps and finally getting up on a short box. For inspiration, though, I snapped a few pictures of others hitting the bigger elements.
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