I'm a Front Ranger that typically skies Mary Jane, Winter Park, & Copper but for each of the past 7 seasons I've made twice seasonal trips to Aspen to ski.

'Highlands is without hesitation my favorite of the Aspen hills. From the 1st time I skied it I understood why it was labled the 'locals favorite'. It became an instant favorite of mine. Honestly, it took me several seasons before I could ski with confidence the Steeplechase area & try the infamous, Highland Bowl. But, now that I have I love this place.

The spectatular views from 'Highlands, the Maroon Belles & Pyramid peak are perhaps the best in the state.

I've always enjoyed the fact that 'Highlands doesn't seem to cater to the ka-ching kaching, bling bling crowd like Ajax. I feel at home at Higlands & always welcome. Eating @ the Merry Go Round reminds me of the 'old school' on mountain restaurants of a by gone era.

Finally, when talking about my experiences & impressions of Aspen with out-of-state people I always tell them that 'Highlands is my favorite & THE place to go for an authentic skiing experience. You simply can't go wrong @ 'Highlands.

1:35 PM: I'm about a quarter of the way up the hike to the top of Highland Bowl, elevation 12,392 feet. At this point the ridge is quite narrow allowing unrestricted views into the bowl to my left and down the other side to my right where open, untracked, out-of-bounds powder for 4000 vertical feet waits to swallow the first skier foolish enough to jump in there. After all the recent snow, you'd have about as much chance of coming out of that uncontrolled slope unscathed as you would from a Dick Chaney interrogation room. The clouds from this morning have mostly burned off. There are still a few remnants around, most of them at a lower elevation than me. The sky is bluebird and the wind nonexistent. No wind on this 12,000 foot ridge? That's as unusual as fresh powder after 9:15 at Winter Park. The footholds in the trail are well established. Just put one foot in front of the other. Up, up, up. Suddenly my trance is broken by distant voices, shouts, whoops. I look to my left and see about a half dozen tiny specks hurtling down the middle of the bowl like so many Stuka dive bombers screaming in for the kill. As I stop and watch the spectacle, a ski patroller hikes past and says, "They just opened Full Curl for the first time this year." I'd skied Full Curl two years ago on the recommendation of a Highlands ski patroller. It starts at the top of the highest peak on the bowl. The slope drops right off the edge for about 1500 vertical feet of sustained steepness. About a third of the way down there's a little knoll which takes a little edge off the pitch, then it drops into an even steeper pitch. According to the map, it has an average pitch of 37 degrees with its steepest point being 45 degrees. Exhilarating. Earlier today we had watched patrol doing avalanche control on Full Curl from the top drop point of the snowcat. We wanted to ski the bowl and had hiked up the snowcat route before it started running. Upon arriving at the gate to the bowl, we found it closed, obviously because of the control activity. Before we dropped into Hyde Park for some fluff in the trees, we took a few minutes to watch the action. Three patrollers started at the top of Full Curl and one by one skied diagonally across the slope, no turns. Shortly after all patrollers were well away from the slope (actually, it's kind of a steep gully straight down the fall line), three puffs of smoke and snow rose from just below the new ski tracks. Three seconds later, three reports echoed around the mountains. No avalanche. When it was clear no snow would slide, they repeated the procedure. Then again. And again. Now, several hours later, hiking up to the top of the bowl, I can see a pattern of craters across and all up and down the slope. The dive bombing skiers swoop down the run and out of sight below. Matt, whose exuberance has literally been uncontrollable during this whole trip, is gushing, "Full Curl, open for the first time this year! Look at all that snow in there! It's ridiculous! We gotta do it!" Well, we gotta get there first. Skis on shoulder, one foot in front of the other. On the top, there is still no wind. The wind gauge, mounted on a 20 foot antenna pole on the peak, is still. Last time I was up here, almost three weeks ago, it was spinning wildly. The Tibetan prayer flags, strung on lines from the antenna to the ground, are flaccid. The view, however, is anything but quiet. The Maroon Bells and Pyramid Peak, all covered in record snow, take turns going in an out of the few remaining clouds. While one is obscured, the other is fully lit in dazzling sunlight. Around the frozen, snow covered lake at the base of the mountains there is not the slightest trace of human activity. The ski patroller who passed us on the way up and announced the opening of Full Curl has just told some other people on the peak that the Northwoods gate opened 15 minutes ago allowing access to the wooded G zones for the first time today. The G zones face straight north, have chutes between otherwise well spaced conifer tress and are unrelentingly steep. Great. G zones or Full Curl? What a dilemma! Matt and I talk it over. Full Curl starts right here. The steep and the deep start right here. Let's do it. Over the edge we go. Except for this morning's avalanche control and the dive bombing squad about 20 minutes ago, the run is untouched. The snow is deep, bottomless. The few tracks in here are easily avoidable. The bomb craters are about three feet deep and about six feet across. No problem skiing around these either. The snow is knee to waist deep. We drop down the slope, bouncing turns on the just-opened run. The sensation of free falling down the steep pitch while floating through the powder makes us recreate the whoops from the dive bombers a few minutes earlier. I sink up to my waist during the apex of my turns, then pop up so the snow is only about knee deep as I come out of the turn, then sink again on the next turn.Matt and I have to stop. Not from exhaustion, but from giddiness. "This is ridiculous!", exults Matt. This is it, the pinnacle of skiing. No one else is on this run. It's wide open, no trees, just a couple tracks, a ton of fresh snow and a relentless pitch. More whoops, more floating turns, down, down, down. Finally we hit the bottom of Full Curl, but not the bottom of this run. With the newly installed Deep Temerity lift, we don't have to get on the catwalk. Instead, we have plenty of fun left. We traverse to our right and get a few turns on the lower part of the G zones. More powder. We bounce through natural terrain parks and half pipes, zooming around trees, up a hillside for a couple turns on a steep pitch, then down into the gully and up the other side. Finally we hit the base of the lift. The few other skiers trickling in all have smiles tattooed to their faces. It's Aspen, so the stretched faces might be a collection of face lifts gone wrong. No, it's pure, unadulterated fun.In a season where nearly every day is a powder day, this one stands out. Ten inches the night before, eleven inches the day before that, 36 inches in the prior seven days. Soft on soft on soft. Matt, his snowboard and I drove up to Aspen Thursday evening from Denver. It snowed nearly the entire 200 miles. The harder it snowed and the worse the driving got, the more excited Matt got. "This is going to be great!" More snow, less visibility, "This is going to be the greatest day of the season!" It's snowing in Glenwood Springs, 40 miles from Aspen and way lower in altitude, "This is going to be ridiculous!" I'm worrying about the upholstery in my car. "This is going to be the greatest day of the century!!" Matt hasn't mastered the art of lowering expectations to make the actual event seem better than expected. For the day we ended up with, he didn't need to.The skiing the rest of the day was epic. The first run was down Steeplechase right off the top of the Loge lift, down to the Deep Temerity lift. Chest shots, face shots, fresh, then fresh, then more fresh. Ridiculous! Repeat. We got on the base lift just after it cranked up at 9. Only a few people were around. The powder stayed fresh and untracked in many places throughout the day. Contrast this with a weekend powder day on the Front Range. Ah, I love civilization!