A Lone Tree man and part-time Breckenridge resident recorded 12.4 million vertical feet in 188 days this winter on the Vail Resorts EpicMix application.
The achievement by 62-year-old Brad Blacketor of Lone Tree equated to an average of 66,000 vertical feet of skiing per day.
“During ski season I blow off everything,” he said.
Blacketor’s total chairlift rides from Keystone Resort’s Nov. 6 opening day to his final day on snow at Breckenridge Ski Resort on May 16 are astounding: Nearly 40 lift rides each day on hill for a grand total of 7,363 for the season.
“None of us are as fast as him,” Blacketor’s skiing pal Tom Fralich said. Fralich himself skied 5.6 million vertical feet in 124 days this winter.
“He’s technically very good at skiing bumps and trees and all kinds of stuff,” Fralich, a part-time Breckenridge resident from Fort Collins, continued. “He can ski some of the hardest bump runs in Colorado top to bottom without stopping at the very end of the day — which is not something I can do. Sometimes we feel guilty that we are holding him back. He doesn’t feel too bad about splitting off when he knows it’s better for his vertical.”
Blacketor’s total of 12,421,058 vertical feet is more than 2 million more vertical feet than his 2018 season, the last full season he skied. In 2020, Blacketor said he was on pace to ski 13 million feet before the novel coronavirus pandemic shut down ski resorts in mid-March.
Blacketor is a native of northern Indiana who typically remains to himself on the hill and hasn’t promoted his accomplishments up to this point. He learned to ski when he moved to Colorado after college in the early 1980s.
Photo from Brad Blacketor
