Mostly right.
Actually, the rocky turn isn't on Aspen Slalom. It's about 1/4 of the way down Fire Swamp. Aspen Slalom is really a pretty fast trail and only rated difficult. The top of Fire Swamp is harder, but it opens up a bit in the middle. The bottom where it drops back into TF gets tighter again.
You could argue that the ratings are all sandbagged, but there are way more people in Dockers on rented XC bikes at Deer Valley than at some other resorts. If you call Aspen Slalom a blue run because you can rail it on your 5" trail bike, there will be way more busted collarbones when Hyrum Smith flips his Schwinn Moab. There was a death on Theives Forest the day before we were there. On a super smooth drop that can easily be rolled. Some guy tried to huck it I guess, and busted his neck.
But in general I agree. Nothing much to kill you at DV. The fact that you can clean everything nicely on HT attests to this. The ladder work is weak. There is also a drop that goes nowhere, the transition is shorter than the height of the drop, and it basically ends 10 feet later in a pit...
Deer Valley could step it up, but yeah, they don't seem too interested. I am not going to complain about it, though, because it's still really fun. Maybe if you and I pooled the $30k to put into some cool stuff they might be interested?
JMH
wyrm said:
The trails showed are all light travel bike trails. Most anything with more than 6" is too much. Not too rough compared to other stuff on that mountain.
BTW the rocky turn is on Aspen Slalom. Some of the trail maintainance crew people were calling it very difficult stuff. While they were all just standing around watching each other tri-pod that section my crew just blew thru that stuff with ease. That is when I learned that Deer Valley doesn't care, by not investing time and resources in finding motivated people who would actually care in making that mountain into a gem.... instead they keep on their winter crew or hire friends who know nothing.
