Top notch Skiing moving way West.

I thought about writing this blog in my financial ticker, but it just didn't fit. Mainly because the root of this story has to do with my childhood and not an investment strategy.

Anyways, growing up in Wisconsin I dreamed of quite a few things. One of which was to get a trip to Breckenridge, Colorado and snowboard on "America's Mountain". I remember requesting trail maps from every Vail resort (Breck, Keystone, Vail, Beaver Creek) each fall. I would open them up as if they had magically changed from year to year and staple each one on my wall. Most teenagers had girls, guys, or sports figures. I had trail maps. To further this, I remember a classmate going to Aspen for a week in February on vacation. He mailed the post card and it arrived two days after his return. Not only was the mail extremely slow back then, Aspen was still considered a commodity back in those days. It had status for a more wealthy taste, while Breckenridge was the symbol of snowboarding heaven.
  Most of the thought provoking days of my youth that I can remember were instilled in the ski hills. What made Colorado the destination of choice was the snow. Higher elevation meant a drier snow and considerably less ice. I grew up snowboarding on ice with hills so small a full speed run would take less than a minute to traverse. A fall on my home town hill meant a knot on the head. Unlike my up bringing, Vail resorts had it made. If your family got to Colorado for one trip a year, you instantly had legitimacy. That's because most places accrued over 450 inches of snow a year. To put into comparison, my local hill was lucky to top 100. This was due to wind blowing the wet snow far away.
   In today's world, I live in Colorado and I have had the opportunity to snowboard or ski five of the Vail resorts (Breck, Keystone, A-Basin, Beaver Creek, and Vail). I read magazines which rank Colorado resorts, and every year those magazines talk about the epic skiing in Utah and California. In the past five years I have seen no more than two resorts a year make the top 10 list from Colorado. Usually they are Vail and something else closer to Utah. When I go to these places in Colorado, I see why my precious Breck has been literally blown off the list. Snow has hit low points in Colorado. What once was prime forest and skiing has become a verge area where 300 inches of snow a year is considered good. Many of the prime trails do not open until January when vacationers hit their peak. Locals know this and end up on the trails in mass formations because the skiing just isn't there anymore.
  I do not believe in Global Warming because I see it as more of a political agenda than an actual problem humans have caused. The climates shift. When I was young, Wisconsin froze, Boston and Buffalo got hammered in head high snow while Colorado became a center for awesome snow formations. These days, Boston is lucky to get anything consistent, Wisconsin get's hammered and a good portion of Colorado stays so dry that fires erupt during the summer. In the winter those effected locations don't even get as much snow. That shift has moved West. Vail resort management has been moving operations into California and Utah for a while now. This past year they picked up two home town hills in Michigan and Minnesota. I think that points directly to where the best snow is.
 So once again, I live in a place where snow is not a guarantee but a prayer to keep the idea of yesteryear alive. Once again, I live in a place salivating for the snow somewhere else.