New Mexico 2024

[Jenny]

So, belated trip report. We headed for New Mexico on March 19th, both to visit my mom and aunt, and also to squeeze out another few days of skiing.

3-20 - hung out in ABQ
3-21 - Ski Santa Fe
3-22 - Pajarito
3-23 - Sipapu
3-24 - hung out in ABQ
3-25 - headed home

Had a nice trip, overall. No travel issues, all luggage arrived at the same time we did. It was nice to be able to track it on the app, especially since my skis didn’t come out on the conveyor, but the app said they were there. Baggage services was helpful, but a maintenance guy had to come out and then go into the chute to retrieve them, since the couple pieces of luggage they sent through didn’t dislodge the tube from whatever it was hung up on.

3-20-24
Headed out to the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History for a few hours. Mom and I had been there before, but DH hadn't. Nice weather for our walk, too.


3-21-24
Day trip to Ski Santa Fe. The road up was clear and dry, paved all the way, but it did get a bit smaller and less smooth the higher up the mountain. No issues, though. Not sure I’d really like to do it in the snow. Nice and sunny, temps were low to mid 30s, IIRC (this is what happens when you wait too long to do the trip report!). No place to just leave bags, but lockers were a fairly reasonable $2.00 and apparently our ski bags cram down far enough to fit into a locker. I was kind of surprised, actually, but we didn’t have anything extraneous in them, which was good, because there was just enough room for our shoes, too. The car wasn’t actually that far away, but there were stairs involved. Senior rate lift tickets start at 62, which we aren’t quite yet, but we chatted enough with the lady behind the desk that she gave us the senior rate anyway, which was super nice. Saved us $19/each.


Since we'd never been there before, we figured we’d just start at the nearest lift (Santa Fe Super Chief) and wander around wherever our whims took us. That meant, away from that lift pretty quickly, as it kept stopping. And stopping. Apparently that's its thing. Anyway, we spent a nice few hours there and hit runs off the Tesuque Peak and Millenium chairs also. Caught myself eying a couple of the further apart tree runs (at least at the top, not sure what they fed into) but didn’t venture in at all. The place I did get brave looked like this, and I had to go through some trees to get out.


Lunch at Totemoff's.


Overall, a good day. We’ll definitely go back.

Then it was down to Santa Fe for dinner with @vanhoskier and her DH. Had a great time, didn’t think to take a pic of us, but I swear it happened!

 

[Jenny]

3-22-24
Pajarito bound. This is the ski area nearest Los Alamos, and involves going through a security gate, which we were not expecting. No worries, just surprised. I guess if I gave it any thought at all I’d have figured they had a road that didn’t involve getting quite so close to the secrets. On the way out, the guy actually said “no right turns, no pictures, next two miles.” Anyway.

Road up nowhere near as twisty-turny as the day before. Conditions clear and dry, and warm. Temps were mid 40s, blue sky, and sun. Snow was correspondingly soft, but not bad at all. I think we were lucky they’d just had a storm that dropped three feet of snow about a week before we skied, though. Got a primo parking spot just below the lodge.

Again, no place to leave the bags, lockers available for the princely sum of $.50. We’d bought the lift tickets online for $37 each, and we also got a $10.00 resort credit to use for lunch. Not a bad deal at all! I believe their ticket sales are all online, and the cafe is order online, too, but they did have a person behind a separate snack counter that you could order from, as well. Everyone we asked for help from was friendly and had no problem answering questions.

My only small gripe with this place was that when they said they had three lifts open, one of them was the magic carpet, and the other was the beginner lift. So there was really only one lift (Aspen) that we used all day, and the territory we could reach was limited. The ski area is wide, far right and far left were inaccessible. There's a lot of burned areas, too. We need to go back here again, too, earlier in the season.

Road on the way up


Riding up the Aspen lift. Bumps below, long, but not as intimidating as Al’s Run at Taos.


Getting toward the top of the lift, on the left.


And the right. The far hill you can see just to the left of the ski chair bar is some of the area that we couldn’t access but is part of the ski area. A lot of it looked burned.


Took this at a turnout when we were leaving. It's also territory we couldn’t access that day, far left looking at trail map.

 

[Jenny]

3-23-24
Time for Sipapu. This was the most remote ski area we hit this trip. Beautiful. Sunny, with high thin clouds, temps low to mid 50s. It was Cardboard Derby day, and they were planning to be open one more weekend, I think.

No place to leave bags, lockers available, but I don’t know what they cost. This was the only place that had the kiosk thingy to use for the lockers, both Santa Fe and Pajarito had keys and tokens/quarters. We were only four rows out in the small lot, though, so we just used the car.

Again, we purchased tickets online - $35 each, plus we each got $10 resort bucks to spend. Same online ordering at the cafe, but harder to get help, and applying the resort bucks was a bit tricky, but we made it all work.

The base area has a creek/river running through it so you cross a wooden bridge and then you’re on the snow.





Sipapu is compact, and I think that looking at the trail map maybe makes it look a bit more intimidating than it really is. We did not ski to the far right looking at the map, as the lift you ski to is lower, and it was getting pretty sloppy. So we tried to stay higher.

Today is the day I got very brave (or stupid, depending) and skied a couple of tree runs, and also some large, steep bumps. Now understand, when I say skied, I mean picked my way through, but I was still in there, so it counts. Baby steps!

So, here's the first set of trees. They were fun.


Here's the not quite as fun but maybe they could get to be fun set we did shortly after the first. They also possibly had Chute in their name.


Finally, I KNOW that when a run is named Oops that it’s gonna have bumps. And I chose to go down it. But I should have taken the turnoff at Flower, and done those bumps instead. Turns out Oops is a double black - oops indeed! I was reasonably competent, didn’t fall, but there were two small pitches I sideslipped past because I just couldn’t bring myself to turn the skis downhill at that time. Again, I will stress that when I say I skied the bumps, I mean I picked my way through them one (maybe two) bumps at a time. And I wouldn’t have done it if the snow hadn’t been soft, bordering on slushy. So, here's a pic of them that doesn’t begin to show what they really looked like.


Anyway, I made it, all in one piece.

Again, we'd definitely come back here. It was a lot of fun.

 

[Jenny]

Two random pics from Sipapu - they have ski bikes you could rent, but we didn’t. This was adorable, though.






3-24-24
Lat day, no pics, went to the Balloon Museum in ABQ. My mom and aunt both volunteer at the festival each year.

3-25-24
Homeward bound! Again, travel went smoothly, except that one of the ski tubes came off the carousel looking like this:


It split up the seam, too. Skis were OK, one pole was bent. DH's tube had a small bump/dent on it, nothing you wouldn’t expect from travel, his skis were fine. Anyway, we now have a $300 travel credit with SW. So, a head start on next year's travels!

Anyway, this was the wrap to our season.

 

[tinymoose]

So, belated trip report. We headed for New Mexico on March 19th, both to visit my mom and aunt, and also to squeeze out another few days of skiing.

3-20 - hung out in ABQ
3-21 - Ski Santa Fe
3-22 - Pajarito
3-23 - Sipapu
3-24 - hung out in ABQ
3-25 - headed home

Had a nice trip, overall. No travel issues, all luggage arrived at the same time we did. It was nice to be able to track it on the app, especially since my skis didn’t come out on the conveyor, but the app said they were there. Baggage services was helpful, but a maintenance guy had to come out and then go into the chute to retrieve them, since the couple pieces of luggage they sent through didn’t dislodge the tube from whatever it was hung up on.

3-20-24
Headed out to the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History for a few hours. Mom and I had been there before, but DH hadn't. Nice weather for our walk, too.
View attachment 23033

3-21-24
Day trip to Ski Santa Fe. The road up was clear and dry, paved all the way, but it did get a bit smaller and less smooth the higher up the mountain. No issues, though. Not sure I’d really like to do it in the snow. Nice and sunny, temps were low to mid 30s, IIRC (this is what happens when you wait too long to do the trip report!). No place to just leave bags, but lockers were a fairly reasonable $2.00 and apparently our ski bags cram down far enough to fit into a locker. I was kind of surprised, actually, but we didn’t have anything extraneous in them, which was good, because there was just enough room for our shoes, too. The car wasn’t actually that far away, but there were stairs involved. Senior rate lift tickets start at 62, which we aren’t quite yet, but we chatted enough with the lady behind the desk that she gave us the senior rate anyway, which was super nice. Saved us $19/each.
View attachment 23035

Since we'd never been there before, we figured we’d just start at the nearest lift (Santa Fe Super Chief) and wander around wherever our whims took us. That meant, away from that lift pretty quickly, as it kept stopping. And stopping. Apparently that's its thing. Anyway, we spent a nice few hours there and hit runs off the Tesuque Peak and Millenium chairs also. Caught myself eying a couple of the further apart tree runs (at least at the top, not sure what they fed into) but didn’t venture in at all. The place I did get brave looked like this, and I had to go through some trees to get out.
View attachment 23034

Lunch at Totemoff's.
View attachment 23036

Overall, a good day. We’ll definitely go back.

Then it was down to Santa Fe for dinner with @vanhoskier and her DH. Had a great time, didn’t think to take a pic of us, but I swear it happened!

I was gonna say that @vanhoskier lives out there and skis there now, so glad you got to meet up with her and her H.

 

[Jenny]

I was gonna say that @vanhoskier lives out there and skis there now, so glad you got to meet up with her and her H.

We’d been planning to ski with her but this was just after her ribs got broken so we had to settle for dinner. We'd never met her husband before - dinner was fun! Already looking forward to the next time we go.

 

[tinymoose]

We’d been planning to ski with her but this was just after her ribs got broken so we had to settle for dinner. We'd never met her husband before - dinner was fun! Already looking forward to the next time we go.

They're great! I very much miss them and getting to see them more often.

 

[diymom]

You make me regret that I wasn't skiing when I lived in ABQ and Los Alamos.

 

[RJ*]

Nice report! It’s great to see other areas in NM get some love here. I haven’t yet gotten to Pajarito but really want to.
I have had an “oops” moment on Oops! Gotta love that name.

 

[ilovepugs]

Great trip report!!

 

[VickiK]

Great trip report!!

Ditto!

 

[AJM]

It looks great !!

 

[Seaglass Skier]

I've been wondering about Pajarito, thank you for this!

 

[Jenny]

Glad people are enjoying it!