In the summer, Hidden Valley is a picnic area in Rocky Mountain National Park, but in winter it transforms into a snow play area and backcountry skier mecca. The base of the ski area is located just a few miles past the Beaver Meadows Ranger Station off Trail Ridge Road. Between 1955-1991, Hidden Valley was a ski resort with lifts and a tow rope. Now it's a backcountry paradise for skiers, especially those who love skiing in the trees.
Check out Hidden Valley skiing in our video:
From the Denver area, you can get to Hidden Valley in ~1:40 taking CO-36 through Lyons. We're always looking for places to ski where you don't have to take I-70, which has been a disaster this snow season.
At the base of HV is a warming hut and bathrooms with flush toilets, sinks with soap, and hand dryers, aka handwarming stations. Ample parking is available, even on Saturdays and Sundays. Most people who come here are families looking for a good sledding hill for the kids, so turnover is high since they only stay for a few hours. On the weekends, volunteers for RMNP are at the base of the sledding hill monitoring sledding activity. They are very friendly to backcountry skiers.
On March 1st, Alaina and I decided to check out Hidden Valley for the first time, and we decided to buy a season pass to RMNP ($40), which pays for itself in two trips to the park. It turned out that the skiing was so good that I went again the next day. As we drove up through Estes Park, the lack of snow was disconcerting, but every 1/2 mile past Beaver Meadows station, the snow piled higher and higher until you get to HV, where the storms drop great snow all winter long.
There are multiple powder pockets hidden here with low traffic and opportunities for fresh tracks every run. The base is rather low at 9,500', and you can skin/hike/snowshoe up to Trail Ridge Rd at 10,300' for several fantastic runs, or you can continue on above the road (if conditions permit), up through the bowl that peaks out around 11,500'.
Treeline here is around 11,200', so we proceed with caution, for the bowl is subject to wind slabs and grades steeper than 30%. We have found the best skiing below the road, for it's both protected by trees and features grades of 20-30% which carries less avalanche risk. Additionally, most people take the old Columbine trail up to the bowl and above the road, so traffic is higher here, and on good snow days these runs will get skied out in a day or so.
I've been studying the old trail maps from the ski resort, and some of the old runs are very hard to find; granted, it's been 23 years since the resort closed. For example, Juniper Traverse and Lower Juniper seem to be completely grown in with trees, though Juniper is still a great run. The one time we tried to find Fire Cut we ended up almost in the creek on River Chute. I'd like to explore 1st-5th Bowls more, since they're tree-lined, but the grade is ~30% so it would have to be on a low avy risk day.
On the downside, the ski-able area at Hidden Valley is smaller than Berthoud Pass, as a comparable backcountry area, but the runs at HV start well below treeline, so the avy risk is lower at HV. The old HV runs Aspen, Juniper, and Lift Line runs are North facing slopes, which usually have less avy risk, but the bowls face east, which typically carry higher risk. On March 8, a volunteer ranger reported to us that a split boarder said he triggered a small avalanche on "Orgasm Alley", and although that's certainly not the name of an old trail at Hidden Valley, I presume this is a run in the bowls above the road as we saw no slides on the north slopes that day.
A last note, at the time of writing this, CO-36 has a section of one lane road controlled by a traffic light that we've waited anywhere from 0 minutes to an hour to pass through. There is a detour on CO-7 that is worth considering during weekdays or high traffic times on the weekends.
Our go-to backcountry skiing spots are now Hidden Valley and Berthoud Pass, with Caribou and East Portal next in line. Loveland Pass still scares me and doesn't have a great skin track to the top.
