Skiing Locally

| UltraRob | Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 8:27 pm

Yesterday it was in the upper 60’s and I went for a ride at lunch in shorts and a short sleeve jersey. The weather men were forecasting a blizzard for last night and today. Even on the way home from work, the highway signs had a blizzard warning on them and said to know your route and be prepared. Almost always when they forecast a big storm and make a big deal about it, we’re lucky if we get more than a couple inches of snow and wind.

When we went to bed last night, it was raining. When I got up this morning I expected to see very little snow. It was actually snowing pretty hard. There was about 5 inches on a table outside but the sidewalk and street only had a couple inches. Most of the trees hadn’t taken the hint from last week’s snow and hadn’t dropped there leaves. We only had some small branches down but there were some big ones in our street. I moved Julie’s van to a spot where there weren’t any trees before I left for work.

With the way the storm came in, I expected it to be worse up north where I work. It’s a few hundred feet higher so it’s a few degrees colder and the storms tend to be worse there even though it’s only about 7 miles from my house. As I got farther north there was a lot more snow. I’ve been putting off getting new wiper blades for my Durango and I had to stop at a parts store for some because I was having trouble seeing. While I was in the store, I heard on the news that parts of the city had 14 inches of snow. In Woodland Park they said 3.5 inches of snow had fallen in 40 minutes. Deb Acord, the reporter from The Gazette that interviewed me before and after RAAM, lives up there and posted some pictures on the out there blog.

I had a big all day planning meeting at work but nobody else made it in. They all live in the north part of the city. They parking lot wasn’t plowed and I was plowing quite a bit of snow with my Durango. We tried doing the meeting on the phone but we needed to access a web tool. Once guy had lost his power and another guy’s high speed internet link kept going up and down. We finally gave up on the meeting. By then it wasn’t snowing as hard but I decided to go home just in case. By then they had closed north bound I-25 and I couldn’t get on south bound because a snow plow had spun out across the on ramp.

This afternoon it had stopped snowing and the snow was steadily melting since the ground is so warm. Late afternoon I went and skied High Drive. The snow was pretty slushy at the bottom. Where people had skied earlier in the day and packed the snow down into the slush against the warm ground, the snow was pretty much gone so people had made new tracks. Up higher where it was colder, the slush that had been sticking to my skis froze. I turned around about 10 minutes from the top. I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to get down if I couldn’t keep the snow from freezing or sticking to my skis plus Kody seemed to be getting tired. Back in August he tore his toe nail pretty bad when we were doing the Manitou Incline and the vet had to work on it. At the same time he had a couple of abscessed teeth removed. I haven’t had him out since then since it took a while for him to heal up. I scraped the ice off when I turned around and my skis stayed clear the whole way down and Kody did fine. I was out for almost an hour and 15 minutes. That’s as much skiing as I did all last winter before my 4 day trip to the Eiseman Hut.

Afterward I picked Danielle up from my parents since I had left her there will I was skiing and took her over to Red Rock Open Space to sled. She had been asking to go all day. There really wasn’t much snow left except on the grass. I found a spot on one of the old roads that had just enough snow to sled on. We also checked out the Freeride Park that is being built. I think it’s supposed to open next month.