A-Basin, CO - ◊◊ 13 Cornices to Bear Trap (5-5-24) [4K]

Sorry about the color quality - not sure what happened but something got on the lens and I didn't notice it on the screen until a couple days later.
Not sure about you but I counted 0 cornices. I swear if someone puts a comment attacking me for lying about the cornice count... it's just the trail name dude!
I was actually looking for "My Chute" which exits onto International, but there's like zero signage up there so this was my backup plan. Still a pretty nice run but neither trail was as hard as I thought they'd be.
13 Cornices felt super overrated and is probably only slightly harder than the parallel portion of Standard. Maybe there's more to it in February or something? Bear Trap is more worthy of its rating and is one of the steepest non-hiking trails in the resort, but the actual difficult part is so short it barely makes a difference. Both felt like they were on the easier side of the double diamond spectrum, but maybe only since I'm used to much longer runs that require more endurance.
Advice: It's standard bumps, and you can scout out Bear Trap from the ride up on Pali. It definitely looks super steep from the lift but it's probably less than 30 seconds of descent if you're going at a reasonable pace.
Overall Difficulty: 5/10
Relative Difficulty (13 Cornices, Double Diamond [EX]): 1/10
Relative Difficulty (Bear Trap, Double Diamond [EX]): 2/10
Accessibility Rating: 8/10 (Signage is decent and no hiking required)
Open Trail Index: N/A (No idea)
Enjoyment Rating: 9/10

[@daneg]

didn't even notice they were DD EX until I read your write up. tbf, part of that is not being/feeling like you're on the top of the world above the tree line. except for the snow having that "spring skiing" sort of mush to it, it looked great. so many wonderful options for bumps out west. could almost never do the same run twice whereas I contented myself lapping the same one or two trails all day in the NE. 😁

[@Bram4Real]

Yeah there's so much variety! I'm kinda the same way out East but I can't tell if that's just because I have incentive to mix it up for recordings purposes. I find that at places like Killington where I've already filmed almost everything I end up doing a lot of repeat laps though. Colorado resorts are just a lot bigger, and since I could only really do day trips out there it made sense to take in as much of each resort as possible. An interesting side note is that A-Basin is considered a small resort by CO standards but it's the same size as Killington and Sugarloaf!