Starting in November, I took day trips to Arapahoe Basin, Loveland and Ski Cooper, the latter so my mom could ski where her dad trained with the Army 65 years ago. In January, a couple of friends scored a week of lodging in Telluride -- a resort that'd long been on my list.

The quality snow continued in Crested Butte, where for the second February in a row, the resort got so pummeled during its annual freeskiing contest that organizers declared a "weather day," translated to mean "powder day" for people who would've been working on or competing in the event.

A friend and I made plans to ski Monarch, a little gem 20 minutes west of Salida, the following week. To our delight the resort reported 23 inches two days before our visit, followed by 12 the next morning. A power outage prevented the lifts from running that day, so we arrived to an untouched, thigh-deep paradise. Five people showed up for first chair; by the time we quit at 2:30, the mountain still wasn't skied out.

Away from the resorts, I'd always wanted to ski in the Sangre de Cristo range, the most striking spine in Colorado, with more than a hundred 13,000-foot mountains rising up from prairie grasslands -- yet no skiers. I got a 4 a.m. start one dark March morning, destined for Cottonwood Peak in the northern Sangres with avalanche forecaster Scott Toepfer. Because I forgot to load my poles into Scott's car, I spent the first hour of our hike searching for juniper and aspen substitutes.

We met a huge range of snow conditions that day, from scary depth hoar and cracks that fractured to the ground, to spring powder on south-facing pitches. That night, we joined a collection of free spirits in the moonlit hot springs next to our campsite for one of the cooler après-ski scenes I've witnessed.

The rewards of mixing it up continued this spring. A high-pressure ridge moved in the second week of March, allowing us to ski a couloir we'd wanted to ski for years. And in early April, after discovering a new tree stash in the Gore Range, an impromptu road trip to Wolf Creek brought 14 inches of buoyant cake. It was a fitting way to end the season-long experiment, skiing bell to bell on a deserted playground three hours from home.