Larry's Bootfitting

04/01/2026

Larry’s Bootfitting: New Service Offering for 2026–27

After listening to a lot of feedback over the past few seasons, we’re excited to announce a new service we’ll be offering next winter.

For the 2026–27 season, Larry’s Bootfitting will be introducing Heli Drops from the roof of the shop to the Indian Peaks Wilderness.

We’ve heard it again and again. People want to go skiing more efficiently, maximize their time in the mountains, and start their day with a proper descent instead of a long drive on I-70.

We think we’ve found a solution.

Working with a small group of local pilots, we’ll be offering limited daily flights departing directly from our roof on Folsom Street. This has involved a surprising amount of coordination, and we’re grateful to our neighbors for working with us as we’ve explored what is, admittedly, a slightly unconventional use of the space.

Special thanks to the folks at the Village Coffee Shop for their flexibility during morning departures, and to McGuckin Hardware for their patience as we’ve worked through rotor clearance, rooftop access, and a few rounds of “what exactly are you trying to do up there?”

From take-off, flights will track west across Boulder, lifting over neighborhoods, crossing the edge of town, and climbing into the foothills. The shift happens fast. Pavement to open space. Open space to ridge. Ridge to alpine. Within minutes you’re looking out across the Divide with terrain unfolding in every direction.

The skiing itself is really the point. Deep in the heart of the Indian Peaks Wilderness and extending into Rocky Mountain National Park, the lines speak for themselves. Long, aesthetic descents, wind-buffed alpine faces, sheltered powder pockets that hold snow well beyond a storm cycle.

We are aware there may be some questions around the finer details of operating helicopters in designated Wilderness areas, but we’ve gotten a surprising level of support from neighborhood community-watch groups and the current administration in Washington D.C.

From a bootfitting standpoint, this opens up some exciting opportunities. We’ll finally be able to test boots in real conditions immediately after a fit, make adjustments the same day, and answer the question of “how does this actually ski” without the usual delay.

We’re also introducing a new booking category: Fit + Flight ($500 deposit). This will include a full fitting session followed by immediate field testing in the Indian Peaks, with the option to return later that day for adjustments if things don’t feel quite right.

Flights will run hourly, weather permitting, with appointments that can be paired directly with a same-day drop. After a few laps in the alpine, guests will be picked up and flown back along a lower scenic route over Boulder neighborhoods, with a planned return landing right smack dab on the shop roof a few hours later. Coffee will still be available pre-flight, and waivers will be thorough.

"It's what the people want, it's what the people need," said shop owner Dan Vardamis. "Who are we, just a small boot shop in Colorado, to ask the hard questions about balancing ultimate convenience and extreme experiences with conserving natural resources and protecting the planet?"

As always, our focus remains the same. Helping people get into boots that actually work, in the environments they actually ski.

To our community, thank you for continuing to push us to think differently about what a boot shop can be.

We’ll share more details soon, including flight schedules, required gear, and how to book.

See you out there.

Larry's Bootfitting

03/21/2026

Been hearing this a lot lately.

“Season’s over.”
“Heatwave killed it.”
“Pack it up.”

And sure, it got warm. The sun is high. The snow in the hills looks a little sad. Totally fair observations.

But if you actually go skiing right now, you might be a little surprised.

There is still a good amount of snow out there.

North facing terrain is holding. Higher elevations are still freezing at night. You can still find really good skiing if you’re willing to look for it. The mountain did not just throw in the towel because Denver hit 85 degrees.

What actually happened is a lot less dramatic.

Winter quietly stepped aside and spring showed up.

And spring skiing plays by different rules.

You do not just roll out whenever and expect it to be perfect. You pay attention. You time it. You catch things just as they soften. You miss it and it is firm. Wait too long and it is a little too soft. Hit it right and it is as smooth and fun as anything you will ski all year.

It is a bit of a game.

Some people love that. Some people decide the game is over.

A lot of what I am hearing right now is less about the actual conditions and more about expectations. If good skiing means midwinter powder, then yeah, that window is closing. Totally fair.

But if good skiing means being outside, moving through the mountains, and finding those moments where everything lines up, there is still plenty on the table.

Honestly, this is one of the better times of year to be out there. Fewer people. Big views. And when you hit it right, that perfect spring snow that makes you feel like a much better skier than you actually are.

So no, the season is not over.

You might just have to adjust your timing a little.

https://larrysbootfitting.com/blogs/news/the-season-isn-t-over-it-just-changed-the-rules

02/02/2026

Still Winter

There’s a familiar chorus this year.

“It’s thin.”

“It’s over.”

“Wait till next season.”

But here’s the quiet truth from those of us who are out there: winter hasn’t gone anywhere.

For the last week the clouds have been parked right on top of the Divide, lingering like they mean it. Most nights the high country has been quietly picking up an inch or so of snow. Nothing headline-worthy. Nothing that lights up an Instagram feed. But when the wind does what the wind does best and moves that snow around, there is real powder to be found. Turns are soft. Edges sink in. It has felt, unmistakably, like winter.

And help is on the way.

Right around February 10, the weather models are lining up behind a real shift. The stubborn high pressure that’s been sitting overhead looks ready to finally step aside, with colder, stormier weather moving in behind it. Snow. Cold. Reset. The kind of pattern change that reminds us why patience is part of the deal.

We’ve been skiing a lot. Today was day 77 for me. A cold, crisp lap in our local backcountry zone. Soft snow. Wind on the ridgeline. Frozen fingers at the top and warm legs on the way down. The kind of day that doesn’t need a caption.

And as if winter needed another reminder of its magic, the Winter Olympics are nearly here.

I still remember being a kid, skiing all day, then going home to watch the Olympics and feeling like the whole world revolved around snow. Bill Johnson charging downhill. Phil and Steve Mahre dancing through gates. Tommy Moe making it look effortless. I’d watch a race, then head back up the hill the next day trying, unsuccessfully, to ski like them. Those Games made winter feel big. Important. Worth celebrating.

That feeling hasn’t left.

This month, that same spirit will be flickering quietly in the background at the shop. The Winter Olympics will be on the TV during open hours at Larry’s. Boot shells on the bench, liners warming, and world-class skiing unfolding on the screen. It feels right. A small nod to the seasons and the skiers who shaped how many of us fell in love with winter in the first place.

This stretch of the season, with cold air settling in, quiet snowfall stacking up, and the Olympics humming along in the background, is a reminder of why we do this at all. It’s not about perfection. It’s about showing up.

We also know times are tough. For a lot of folks, everything feels heavier right now. So from February 1 through February 28, we’re doing what we can to help. Our 2026 Winter Olympics Ski Boot Sale is on, with many great models at reduced pricing, and as always, full bootfitting service included. Same care. Same process. No shortcuts.

Winter is still here. The skiing is better than you think. And there’s a lot to celebrate.

See you out there.

— Dan & Elaine

https://larrysbootfitting.com/blogs/news/still-winter

01/09/2026

It Ain’t Perfect. But It’s Good Enough.

There’s been a lot of talk this season about how bad it is.

Not enough snow.
Too much wind.
Wrong temperatures.
“Worst year ever.”

We hear it every day in the shop.

And to be fair, this has not been a banner winter by any objective measure. Snow totals are low. Coverage has been thin. You’ve had to be thoughtful about where you go and when. There’s no denying that.

But here’s the thing.

My wife and I have been skiing almost every day.

Not perfect skiing. Not bottomless. Not face shots on demand. But real skiing. Quiet mornings. Soft turns where you find them. Sun breaking through trees. A skin track winding through cold woods. Moments that feel unreasonably good given the conditions on paper.

Recently, two customers came in after skiing Eldora.

I asked the first how his day was. He paused, smiled a little, and said,
“Ah… it was perfect. So beautiful up there.”

Ten minutes later, I asked another customer the same question.
“Another day at Suckdora,” he said.

Same mountain. Same weather. Same snow.

Wildly different experiences.

Skiing has always been like surfing that way. You don’t get to order conditions off a menu. You read the day, you adjust your expectations, and you take what’s offered. Sometimes it’s all-time. Sometimes it’s subtle. Sometimes the joy is in simply being out there at all.

That doesn’t mean standards don’t matter. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hope for storms. But it does mean attitude plays a bigger role than we like to admit.

This season has required a little creativity and a little humility. It’s asked us to slow down, look closer, and appreciate smaller wins. And honestly, that’s not such a bad thing.

The other good news? Patterns are shifting. We’ve had multiple days of snow recently, and more looks to be on the way. Winter isn’t done yet.

So no, it hasn’t been perfect.

But it’s been good enough. And good enough, when you’re paying attention, can still be pretty damn great.

— Dan & Elaine
Larry’s Bootfitting

https://larrysbootfitting.com/blogs/news/it-ain-t-perfect-but-it-s-good-enough

12/22/2025

Solstice, Low Tide

I went out this morning almost exactly as the solstice arrived. Not ceremonially, not deliberately poetic, just because that’s when I woke up and the light was finally there. The shortest day of the year, measured not by clocks but by how quickly the cold settles back in once the sun drops behind the ridge.

It’s low tide out there right now. Thin coverage, rocks showing through, wind-worked snow, the kind of skiing that doesn’t look impressive from a distance and doesn’t reward laziness up close. This isn’t the season for abundance yet. It’s the season for paying attention.

I didn’t see anyone else. No skiers in the parking lot, no tracks cutting across the slope, no noise except the wind moving across the surface. That absence matters. Solstice is a pivot point, but it doesn’t announce itself. There’s no sudden shift, no immediate payoff. Just the quiet knowledge that the arc has stopped falling and begun, almost imperceptibly, to rise again.

The ridge was firm and exposed, the snow textured and honest. The track heading out felt more like intention than ambition. This was travel, not conquest. The sun sat low and harsh, flattening contrast and throwing long shadows that made every ripple in the surface legible. Snow like this demands presence. You don’t ski it fast. You ski it correctly.

Dropping off the top ridge, the turns came slowly. Each one placed, measured, adjusted mid-arc as the surface changed beneath the skis. Wind board giving way to chalk, chalk stiffening unexpectedly, the occasional scrape of something you couldn’t quite see but knew was there. Low tide skiing teaches restraint. It asks you to manage pressure, to stay centered, to accept that flow looks different this time of year.

And then, lower down, it opened just enough. Not soft, not deep, but workable. Enjoyable in the way that competence is enjoyable. Turns linking cleanly, rhythm returning, the mountain offering a small nod of approval for having approached it on its own terms.

That’s what surprised me most: how good it felt. Not despite the conditions, but because of them. There’s something grounding about skiing when expectations are low and attention is high. When you’re not chasing the best possible version of the day, just the truest one.

Solstice doesn’t promise immediate change. It just marks the moment when the loss stops. From here, the light returns in increments too small to notice unless you’re looking for them. A minute here. A sliver there. Enough, eventually.

This morning felt like that. Low tide, yes, but stable. Quiet. Satisfying in a way that doesn’t need to be advertised. A reminder that even in the leanest part of the year, there’s still something to work with. Still a reason to go out. Still turns to be made, if you’re willing to make them carefully.

12/01/2025

"Larry, Gary, and the Instrument Under Your Feet"

Some winter mornings at Eldora feel like an initiation. The wind scrapes across the ridge, the lift glides overhead, and everything takes on a kind of metallic clarity. I was riding the chair on one of those mornings, thinking about ski boots, about the stories that swirl around them, and about the people who taught us how to care about feet in plastic.

I hear it a lot: Larry’s Bootfitting fits boots notoriously tight. My wife and I worked for Larry for five years, and I can say without hesitation that Larry did fit tight. It was not indecision or laziness. It was a belief system. Larry believed that performance comes from connection. When the boot is an extension of the body rather than a padded chamber, the ski listens. A snug boot makes demands, but it also responds. That responsiveness was the whole point for Larry.

There are stories about him. The rumor about growing up on a Blackfoot reservation, being teased for having big feet, and getting revenge by putting every skier in a shell that was one size smaller than sanity. Skiers love stories like that because lore travels faster than nuance. Maybe there was truth to it, maybe nothing at all. The real truth was simpler: Larry believed that a precise boot could teach you something about your skiing that comfort never could.

Before Larry, Elaine and I learned to fit boots at Neptune Mountaineering. That world answered a different set of problems. Gary Neptune had climbed Everest. He had spent more time in the mountains than most people spend in their cars. His feet had frozen, blistered, lived inside plastic for weeks. He knew what boots had to do when failure had consequences. Gary believed in thick wool socks, circulation, and volume. A boot should give you enough room to survive the mountain you were walking into, not just the run beneath the lift. If Larry was obsessed with the perfect transfer of power into an edge, Gary was obsessed with what happens when you have to cross a glacier in the dark, or ski eight hours out of a storm system.

It still makes me laugh how two legends could take the same object and arrive at opposite religions. Larry and Gary rarely agreed on comfort, on sizing, or on philosophy, but they shared the same intensity. Neither approach was gentle. Both were born out of real lives spent in snow.

Working at Neptune taught us respect for the body in the mountains. Working at Larry’s taught us respect for the ski beneath your feet. In one shop, boots were survival equipment. In the other, they were tools of control. Somewhere between those two worlds, Elaine and I found our voice. When we eventually took the shop over and began training our own crew, we realized how lucky we were. We carry Gary’s understanding of what the mountain can do to a person, and Larry’s insistence that a ski boot is not a bedroom slipper. We hand that blended perspective to the next generation. They hear the legends, they learn the extreme positions, and then we teach them the most important thing: listen to the skier.

Bootfitting attracts strong personalities, and there is an old-school mindset that the fitter is the authority and the skier is the one who must accept discomfort. The verdict is always downsizing. If your toes hurt, you’re “doing it right.” I have no patience for that. Skiing is not obedience. Skiing is expression. The boot is the instrument.

Some people need a violin. Some need an electric guitar. Some need a drum kit. You don’t hand everyone a Stradivarius and say “good luck.” A beginner will be terrified of it. A jazz musician will be bored. A punk rocker might split it clean in half. The right instrument is the one that lets you play your own music, not someone else’s.

I grew up ski racing. I was lucky. People paid attention to my feet. That shaped how I work now. I treat every customer like their performance matters, but that does not mean fitting them like they are chasing downhill medals. I think of bootfitting like a race team garage. The skier is the driver. We are the mechanics. They bring feedback. We make adjustments. They try again. The loop is where discovery lives.

On that cold morning at Eldora, my own boots were snug but not punishing. I have a 9.5 D width foot and I ski a Tecnica Mach1 MV 130 in a 26.5. It is not a race fit, but it skis beautifully and lets me enjoy the mountain. Larry would have put me in a 25.5. Maybe I could ski it. Maybe I could even ski it well. But I am older now, I ski most days, and I want to spend my bandwidth on the terrain, not on my toes. I keep the same boot in LV too. When I’m sharp and the snow is clean, I take the LV and treat the hill like a racetrack. It rips. But eight mornings out of ten, when I’m tired or need an extra cup of coffee or my feet are grumpy, I take the MV. There is wisdom in that choice. The instrument still plays, but the song lasts all day.

People still walk into the shop expecting the myth: that we will force them down two shell sizes, tape their toenails, and send them out grinning through the pain. That rumor will probably chase us forever. It reminds me of where we came from. It reminds me that snugness and connection matter. But it also reminds me what we’ve built. We do not fit for legend. We fit for people. We listen. We respect physiology, goals, and personality every bit as much as performance.

We were fortunate to be trained by legends. Gary Neptune knew what boots must do when the mountain is not interested in letting you leave. Larry knew what boots must do when you want to carve a line so clean it feels like you invented it. Elaine and I stand somewhere in the space between those philosophies. We weave their knowledge with our own miles on snow, our injuries, our successes, our failures. The generation working beside us will move that needle again. They will take what we give them and reshape it, just as we reshaped what was handed to us. The craft is not static. It is passed down like a favorite chord progression or a local backcountry skintrack.

In the end, ski boots are not just plastic and hardware. They are a musician’s instrument, and every skier has their own music to make. If there were one correct solution, Larry and Gary would have agreed. They never did. That is the gift they left us. The real art of bootfitting lives in the space between passion and listening, between knowledge and curiosity, between the instrument you think someone should play and the one that allows them to ski the mountain with joy.

For more drivel from the Larry's Bootfitting Blog visit: https://larrysbootfitting.com/blogs/news

11/20/2025

"Dark Time of the Year"

There’s something about the low November light that I love. That hour at the end of the day when the sun has already slipped behind the ridge, the angles sharpen, the air goes cold, and everything feels a little quieter. Skiing then, in that dim, blue-edged light, feels truer somehow. The mountains aren’t trying to impress you. They’re just there, stripped back, asking you to meet them as they are.

Early winter in Colorado is like that. Quiet. Liminal. A season that doesn’t quite believe in itself yet. There isn’t enough natural snow at the trailheads this year, but the thin white ribbon of manmade snow at our local hill is enough to get those first turns in. It’s not glamorous or midwinter-hero snow, but there’s something honest about it. A ritual. A way of saying, I’m still here. I’m ready when you are.

Up north, in Utqiaġvik, Alaska, the change is even more dramatic. The sun set this year on November 18 at 1:36 p.m., and it will not rise again until late January. I have never experienced the polar night myself, but I’m fascinated by it. The idea of living through weeks of blue twilight and long, unbroken darkness feels both unsettling and beautiful. A deep winter pause. A world turned inward. I imagine it must change the way time feels, and maybe even the way a person pays attention.

The closest thing we have right now is these late afternoons at our local hill. Just the last light of the day brushing the snow, the sky shifting from gold to ash to blue, and everything slowly dimming. Not even close to the magnitude of the Arctic, but it hints at the same quiet. The same slowing. The same invitation to notice more with less light.

This evening I clicked in for a couple of laps at Eldora as the last of the daylight slid sideways across the hills. The manmade snow had that pale early-season sheen, not lit by floodlights and not dark either, just held in the soft blue of a winter afternoon turning into evening. The trees stood black against the sky. The clouds were doing their November thing, streaked and restless. It was quiet enough to hear every edge set and every breath. Nothing glamorous or heroic. Just simple skiing in thin light, the best kind of beginning.

Maybe that’s what this season is for: not chasing big objectives or perfect conditions, but noticing what still glows when everything else gets dim. A kind of winter honesty. A slower pace. A little more gratitude for whatever light we get, however briefly it appears.

This is the dark time of year. And there’s something beautiful about learning how to move through it, slowly and deliberately, with a bit of softness toward yourself and the world.

11/30/2022

60th Anniversary fact of the week:

In November of 1973, the center-pole Cannonball two-person chairlift replaced the #1 T-Bar on the front side of the Mountain. The center-pole seats were replaced by new “used” chairs from Copper Mountain in the 1990s; the lift would serve the frontside faithfully for 44 seasons.

Don't forget to share your memories—words, photos, videos—submit them through the link in our bio or share them on social media using hashtag .

11/09/2022

Mad River Glen in Vermont gets the award for the most real social media account in the North American ski industry. Snowmaking there began last night - this is about 60 seconds in. If this photo had a title I think we'd call it, "Beginning."

❄️❄️❄️

11/01/2022

Want boots? We've got boots! Our selection of boots is currently as good as it's going to get this season before we start selling through stuff. We just opened up a bunch of appointment slots, so if you want to get in here this season the time to book is now. Go to larrysbootfitting.com to make an appointment!

10/19/2022

We're gonna go out on a limb and say that folks who whine about the first significant snowfall of the year being bad because it will "cause unstable facets" have lost a little basic joy and romance for the sport of skiing. When we were kids that first snowfall was case for unbridled, pure joy and that should be true for adults too. 7.8 inches predicted in the Indian Peaks area near Nederland by mid-next week. Not enough to really ski, but enough to toss on the be**er rock skis, rock skins and tool around the woods for a few hours enjoying winters first delightful blast. Bring it.