While Evan mostly learned to ski the same weekend as Emma, when we put him in ski school at Winter Park, he actually got on skis successfully the first time in Rocky Mountain National Park in late December. We decided to rent skis and see how the kids did on them at the sledding hill area there in RMNP. Unfortunately, that day was exceptionally windy and the gusts were blowing snow in our faces, which Emma particularly did not like. So she was not a happy camper to try skiing then. However, Evan gave it a go for a few runs. The snow there was extremely compacted though, so not ideal conditions at all. Nonetheless, he was able to keep his balance and ski down a few gently-sloped areas with John's help. After that we all just did some sledding, which both kids enjoyed immensely.
Winter Park Ski School
Evan's ski school started outside and we picked him up outside on the beginner slopes (by the magic carpet). When we learned that his age group would be separate from Emma, we were nervous about them being apart, but I think it went okay as the 3-4 yrs class was definitely more low key and probably spent more time indoors than out. Whereas with Evan we dropped him off on the slope, and he was ready to go! When we were coming down the last run of our day, John actually ended up skiing up right alongside Evan! He had already gotten to go up the chair lift by the end of his first day and was able to ski down some full green beginner runs!
After we met up with him that day, he wanted to keep doing the magic carpet, so we got to see him show us what he'd learned. He was doing the "pizza" pretty good and really just having a great time. He went up and down so many times in that last hour before the magic carpet closed I lost count.
My boy excited to learn to ski!
Showing us his new skiing skills at the end of his first day of lessons
On the second day, he got moved up to the "Learn to turn" level of classes, although he was already doing turns. His teachers (on both days) said he was doing amazing. The end of the second day his teacher said he was the leader of the group always leading the way down the hill and learning really fast. We picked him up a bit early and so we decided to go up the lift with him and do our first green run with him altogether. It was really neat to be able to ski with him, but he already is willing (and mostly able) to ski much faster than I'm comfortable with! He showed us the red light green light game, by stopping with his pizza when we said red light, but toward the lower part of the run him and John went way ahead of me. John got video of him on the Go Pro. He was pretty funny doing poses as he skied down, and even doing a pointing pose at someone who was on the side of the slope, who then waved back. After that run I had to go pick up Emma, but John, Evan, and then Lena and Greg did a couple more runs up the chair lift and back down. On one of those runs, when Evan was looking backward while skiing, he did a face plant. But he was okay and continued on skiing after that without any issues.
The ski school puts GPS trackers on all the kids, and the cool part is you can see where all they went afterward. Here are the maps of what Evan did both days, during the time he was in school with his tracker. The 3 or so extra runs he did on the lift after class on day 2 won't show up on this. The large cluster of messy tracks is the ski school building, where they go inside for lunch. I'm guessing they lose some signal in there too. The magic carpet area is just to the north-northwest of this building, where you can see a looped cluster of tracks on top of one another, from all the times he did the magic carpet.
Day 1 map
Day 2 map
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