{"id":428,"date":"2009-04-22T20:21:14","date_gmt":"2009-04-23T02:21:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.14erskiers.com\/blog\/?p=428"},"modified":"2009-04-22T20:21:14","modified_gmt":"2009-04-23T02:21:14","slug":"monarch-cat-skiing-41209","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/14erskiers.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/monarch-cat-skiing-41209\/","title":{"rendered":"Monarch Cat Skiing 4.12.09"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nine of us headed down to Monarch to catch the last day of cat skiing for the season. Regularly, the price is $180, but for the closing weekend the price was reduced to $100. We were expecting about a foot or more, but ended up with about 7 or 8″ instead, but thankfully the snow was quite wet and supportive, so we rarely felt the hard crusty springtime snow underneath. Here’s some of the crew:
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I didn’t take too many photos, as speed is the name of the game for groups trying to get their money’s worth. Here’s one from the top:
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Here’s Zach ripping it up with some of the terrain behind.
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Lift-served Monarch has never been high on my list of places to go, as there is a serious lack of steep skiing to be had and I generally get bored there even on powder days. The snowcat terrain, on the other hand, is quite a bit steeper and has a lot more cliffs and spines to play with. Ben and Will started jumping off of some pretty sizeable airs (25’+), which the guides weren’t too thrilled with given that conditions weren’t great for hucking and the guides probably wanted a nice mellow end of their season instead of a bunch of rippers from Crested Butte going for it all day long.<\/p>\n

This was my first time cat skiing, and while it cannot compare to heli skiing, it is pretty fun and definitely recommended. Would I go back to Monarch for $180 during regular season? Probably not, since I’d rather hike for something or ski Crested Butte inbound, but I certainly felt like I got my $100 worth. All in all, this day gets a: (bonus points for whoever captions this photo)
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Nine of us headed down to Monarch to catch the last day of cat skiing for the season. Regularly, the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/14erskiers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/14erskiers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/14erskiers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/14erskiers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/14erskiers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/14erskiers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":429,"href":"https:\/\/14erskiers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions\/429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/14erskiers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/14erskiers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/14erskiers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}