What If Driving Is An Undesirable Or A Non-Option?

The world’s COVID hangover is going to continue well into 2021 so obviously ongoing precautions are needed to keep from contracting the disease. For those who live within three to four hours by car of a ski area, you’ve got options. Your car becomes your transportation bubble and then while skiing, just stay away from people and wear a mask under your scarf.

However, for those of us who live a long way from a ski area, getting to a ski area is, at best, a one day trek each way. So three days of skiing turn into five, five days of skiing, needs seven, etc.

Ski Apache is the closest to my place in Texas, 560 miles straight west and an eight or nine-hour drive.

Taos is 650 miles from my front door. Plan on 10 hours. I’ve made the drive in eight, but….

Ski Durango, a.k.a. Purgatory and one of my all-time favorite places to ski, is 860 miles away. Plan on 13 hours in a car unless you want a ticket or two.

Conditions are already very good in the Rockies and Sierra Nevada. I can feel the slopes beckoning. So, how do you get to a ski area if you don’t like driving long distance?

If you own a plane or can afford to charter one you can fly in your own bubble. For the rest of us, unless you can take a train or bus, the only other practical way is sitting in an airline seat with 150 or more of ‘your closest friends.’ The airlines have done a yeoman’s job of sanitizing the planes, updating the cabin filtration systems as well as trying to convince the traveling public that sitting in one of their aluminum tubes won’t lead to becoming infected. I’m not convinced.

The risk doesn’t come from just the plane ride. There are the people in the terminals and who knows if they’ve been exposed. Throughout the trip, you touch all kinds of things so latex gloves become the order to the day. Net net, the CDC says the risk of catching COVID is increased if you travel by plane.

When you actually receive the COVID vaccine should be factored into the decision to go skiing. For example, I’m in category 1B (over 75, compromised immune system) which means early this year, I should have the first dose injected. Second dose comes, depending on which flavor you receive, about a month later. Full efficacy of the vaccine occurs about a month after the second injection.

The vaccine gives me choices. There are non-stop flights from DFW Airport to airports a short drive from almost any ski area in the country. In a COIVD-vaccinated world, flying on airlines again becomes the best option for those of us who don’t live near a ski area.

So here’s the timeline that’s rattling around in my head. Mid-January, first dose. Mid-February, second does. Mid-March, full efficacy. That’s when I am going skiing!