Full moon fools

One of my favorite winter adventures is cross-country skiing by the light of the moon. A winter moon can pretty much light your way, and I've seen nights so bright you can read a map by moonlight. But there's one thing to remember as you plan your full-moon adventure for Saturday (the date of the next full moon): it could be cloudy. We were cross-country skiing in Grand County one night under the light of a beautiful moon. The terrain wasn't technical, but it rolled along through the trees and meadows. We were thinking of the bonfire and hot cider that awaited us when we returned, when a huge cloud engulfed the moon. We had packed headlamps in our backpacks, but in our haste to head out, we hadn't checked the batteries, and we ended up with three lamps for four skiers. We learned something that night: Skiing by headlamp is different than skiing by moonlight. It's not quite as ethereal...more physical and a lot clumsier. Those little rolls and turns that were almost effortless in the moonlight seemed to grow harder in the dark, and by the time we were done, every one of us had fallen off the trail at least once. Forecast for Saturday: Mostly clear. What the forecast means: Check your headlamp batteries. This image is from a NASA site - check it out so you can sound really knowledgeable about the moon.
- Deb

A Colorado Question

This week’s "Colorado State of Mind" which airs Fridays on Rocky Mountain PBS asks: Should the lost foot the cost? When people get lost while hiking, hunting, skiing or snowboarding, someone has to search for them. That costs money. Should local governments make the lost parties pay, or is saving their lives – and the expense of it – the responsibility of government?

Especially timely since more people are ducking ropes and getting fined for it.
One could certainly argue charging will cause people to think before they duck, but does it also disuade the lost from calling for help?

Discuss.

-Dave

The missing lynx

Since 1999 when lynx reintroduction started in the San Juan Mountains, 204 of the adult cats have been released and another 101 kittens have been born. In 2006, Division of Wildlife biologists estimate about 200 lynx are living in Colorado. And they are not just sticking to the San Juans. According to a story in the Summit Daily News yesterday, The lynx are on the move. Some have gone as far as 100 miles north of I-70. A map of sightings by the CDOW even shows that they have wandered into western areas of the Pike National Forest. A map from a great story in National Geographic this month shows the areas of the state that are currently Lynx territory.

The bottom line is that these cats are reproducing on their own and doing a great job. It's one of the state's big biological success stories.

-Dave

Sun in the sky, ice on the trails

Just got back from a bike ride in Stratton Open Space. My rule of thumb is if there is no snow in my downtown backyard, then there is no snow on the lower trails (Palmer Park, Garden of the Gods, Stratton, etc.) That proved to be true for the most part at Stratton. Trails clear. Weather good. Other riders out. Then I took a trail ducking down a shallow ravine and following it like a luge track. This is my favorite trail, and an interesting one because I am almost positive it is a renegade trail (i.e. a trail built by someone who didn't have permission) but it is also one of the most thoughtfully planned and maintained trails in the area. These were my thoughts as I was flying down, and then I found the ice. Saw it, rode over it, thought "just keep going don't turn," kept going, held breath, fell anyway, sliding off to one side and bouncing down (luckily) into a big pile of pine needles.
This is just to say, that though the weather looks like it will be pretty warm and clear for the next week, the ice still lurks out there, and not always in places where a soft landing waits.
Comment with any other trail conditions.
-Dave

Weigh in on roadless areas

This peak near the Lost Creek Wilderness is in an unprotected "roadless area."
As reported in The Gazette Thursday, roadless areas in the Pike National Forest have an uncertain future.
There are 14.5 million acres of Forest Service land in Colorado. Wilderness areas account for 3.3 million of those acres, roadless areas 4.4 million.
In May, President Bush repealed a rule enacted by the Clinton administration that extended protection to a lot of roadless areas that weren't officially "wilderness."
Now anything could happen to those roadless areas - gas drilling, logging, an alpine slide: the door is open.
In the next year, a bipartisan group of legislators will be holding public hearings on the issue. The next one is today in Pueblo from 5 to 8:30 p.m. at the Pueblo Convention Center, 320 Central Main St.


Colorado Springs residents also can submit their thoughts to the task force by visiting the Roadless Area Task Force Web site.
Written comments can be mailed to The Keystone Center, attn: Roadless Areas Review, 1628 St. John Road, Keystone CO 80435.

-Dave

New ski area slow to start

Some of you may have heard about Echo Mountain Park, the new "skate park on snow" being built on the old site of groovy family 1970s ski area Squaw Pass.
It's being hyped as the future of skiing to cash in on the X-box generation. But, in proper slacker fashion, it was scheduled to open in late November, but dude, there was totally a cement shortage. So then it was December. But Whoa, hella snow. So Fursure January.
The latest, which I heard from the manager, Doug Donovan, about 10 minutes ago, was first thing February. Donovan, by the way, is not some slacker but a very together dude who is opening the first new ski area in Colorado in decades. He may very well revolutionize the industry.
But until the lifts are running, I say, whatever.

-Dave

All mine

This is why I like the Gems - Colorado's smallest ski resorts. Under a cloudless sky, a new half foot of powder waited for me and a few of my closest friends Thursday at Ski Cooper. It's a small resort, but if you don't have to share the mountain with anyone, it seems as big as the sky that frames it.
Here's the view from the triple chairlift at noon. (I think we made most of those tracks.) - Deb

Pike on the Web

The Santa Fe Trail Association just put up a great new Zebulon Pike Web site, www.zebulonpike.org , which includes a calendar of events in different states and some good maps.
Check it out.

Dave

Deep into Mirkwood

After one unsuccessful mission, I finally got into Monarch's new Mirkwood Basin yesterday. Let's just say that our guide Andy (above) knew where to find the freshies. Snow will continue off and on until Friday, which means Mirkwood should be in top form this weekend.
-Dave

Happy Birthday Zeb Pike

Thursday would have been Zebulon Pike's 227th birthday.
We can look back 201 years to how he spent his only birthday in the Rockies. It was pretty miserable. After a month of torturous wandering, on this day he realized he had gone in a giant circle.
Nice gift, huh?

Here's the entry from his journal:


5 January 1807
"I went out in the morning to hunt, whilst the two lads were bringing upsome of their loads still left at the foot of the mountain. Wounded several deer, but was surprised to find I killed none, and on examining my gun, discovered her bent, owing as I suppose, to some fall on the ice, or rocks; shortly after received a fall, on the side of a hill, which broke her off by the breach; this put me into desepoir, as I calculated on it, as my grandest resource for great part of my party; returned to my companions sorely fatigued and hungry; I then took a double barrelled gun and left them, with assurances that the first animal I killed, I would return with part for their relief. about ten o'clock rose the highest summit of the mountain, when the unbounded space of the prairies again presented themselves to my view, and from some distant peaks, I immediately recognized it to be the outlet of the Arkansaw, which we had left nearly one month since! This was a great mortification, but at the same time I consoled myself with the knowledge I had acquired of the source of the La Platte and Arkansaw Rivers, with the river to the north west, supposed to be the Pierre Juan, which scarcely any person but a madman would ever purposely attempt to trace any further than the entrance of those mountains, which had hitherto secured
their sources form the scrutinizing eye of civilized man...

.... "This was my [twenty-eighth] birth-day, and most fervently did I hope
never to pass another so miserably. Distance 7 miles..."

-Dave

Off limits

Here's a lesson in personal responsibility. The Associated Press reported today that the snowmobilers who were killed in a New Year's Day avalanche were in the Neota Wilderness Area, a trailless area northwest of Denver where motorized vehicles are prohibited. The men and their group had apparently met up with a Colorado man who showed them a place where they could "high mark," a popular activity for snowmobiliers who compete to see who can get the farthest up a steep hill. The Coloradan said there was no sign informing them they were in a wilderness area, which is where the lesson comes in: If you head out to play in Colorado's backcountry in the winter, check a map first. Wilderness regulations aren't taken lightly and sometimes signs are buried in the snow. In this case, the Forest Service says it is investigating, and the party could be fined. - Deb

Holy tamale

It's snowing in the mountains again. Are you tired of hearing that yet? Of course not. This season has blessed us with weeks of excuses for trips to our favorite resorts. Here's another reason for the trip, even if you don't ski or board - Dorothy's Tamales. Last year, Dorothy Russel sold her homemade tamales from a bright blue tractor-trailer just off U.S. Highway 24 in Hartsel. This year, she moved that trailer and hooked it onto the back of a bright blue house, mere yards from her previous location. Russel and her crew make 40 dozen or more tamales a day, and her business is open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. - perfect hours for day-tripping skiers. We've gotten so hooked on her buffalo tamales that some days we've even left the mountains a little early, eager to get to Dorothy's before she closes. - Deb

Mystifying

When my daughter was little, she always paused at the trailhead to ask me how many miles we were going to cover that day. I would tell her "a mile" and when we reached our destination, she would marvel at how incredibly far that seemed. "But a mile holds so much," she would tell me.
She was right. Every time I drive through South Park on the way to a day of skiing or plunge into a deep forest only to discover a hidden meadow, I'm reminded at the larger-than-life quality of our state. (Big sky in the photo is looking west from Las Animas.)
Helen Hunt Jackson was a writer who loved the size of Colorado's skies and mountains. In "A Colorado Week," printed in the New York Independent in 1874, she retold this story about the vastness she had also experienced:
"There is a comic story of a traveller in Colorado who, having been repeatedly misled and mystified by the marvelous discrepancies between real and apparent distances in the rarified air, was found one day taking off his shoes and stockings to wade through a little brook, not a foot wide.
" 'Why, man, what are you about? Why don't you step over?' " exclaimed everybody.
"'No! no! you can't fool me,'" he exclaimed. "'I shan't be surprised if it turns out to be a quarter of a mile across this brook.'"
- Deb

Glasses 4 U

Here's a cool tip, featured in this Friday's Out There cover about skiing under the lights at Keystone: When it gets dark, exchange your goggles for safety glasses. Yeah, the kind you buy at the hardware store. Don't worry about looking like a geek - ever since home improvement shows have taken over cable TV, safety glasses have gotten positively chic. (Check out this model from Home Depot for $6.)

I could be a little obsessed with glasses right now. Last week, I got off the gondola at Keystone without goggles or my sunglasses. I survived with a few new squint lines, but I have a new appreciation for polarization. - Deb

A year to tell stories about? Seems like it

This weekend my lovely bride (above) and I trawled the deeps of Summit and Vail Counties, hitting up Keystone, Breck, and Vail in awesome powder conditions. Every morning when we woke up, the snow report said there was between two and four inches, yet when we reached the steep trees tucked on each peak, we found anywhere from six inches to over a foot!
Here's what we didn't find: rocks, stumps, brown spots, open creeks.
The coverage is amazing! At least in the northern mountains, which have almost 200% of average snowpack. The San Juans are still dry, with only about a third of the snow they usually get. (This is after an record winter in 2004-2005 in which some San Juan spots got 250% of average snow fall).

Twice as much snow as usual means this is an epic year. There, I said it, epic.
This is the kind of year all true skiers have to make extra efforts to enjoy, both because the skiing is phenomenal and because then in the next dry spell you can get that faraway look and say "remember the snow in 2006? Remember that day in Blue Sky Basin with face shots all day through the trees? Remember how there was so much snow that they closed I-70?"

People are still talking about years like that from the early 1990s. Now it's time to update.
The snow is by no means slowing down. After a snowy weekend, the next storm rolls in today with a 70% chance of snow dumping at a rate of 1.5 inches per hour in Summit County. Tomorrow will continue the trend toward epic. Might be a good idea to be there. - Dave

Adding and subtracting

As I write this, the members of the AdAmAn club are making their way up Barr Trail. Their destination: the summit of Pikes Peak. Their mission: To usher in the New Year with what has to be the highest fireworks display in the world. The group is legendary, and deserves the attention it gets each year. But the AdAmAn climbers aren't the only ones with a New Year's Eve mission. Enter SubtractAmAn, a group that has shared the trail with AdAmAn since 1989.
The group was founded by Frank Reetz, a Denver educator, and Dennis Weid, of Canon City to honor friends and pets who had died. The two men came up with the group's name partly as a spoof on AdAmAn, but mostly because they were honoring the dead - those who had been "subtracted from life."
On SubtractAmAn's first New Year's Eve climb, Reetz says there was a little friction between the two groups, but since then, they've learned to get along. Just like the AdAmAn members, this group has had to endure brutal winter weather on their annual climbs, but it looks like this year will be easier. - Deb

Prosperous New Year from all of us in Out There!

Not all hut trips are hard

In the 10th Mountain Hut System, Skinner Hut is known for being the hardest to get to. It's a 10-mile slog up 3,000 feet to a one-room cabin on a remote ridge.
If that's not your cup of cocoa, check out the easiest-to-get-to hut, Shrine Mountain Inn.
It's a two-mile ski on groomed trails to a series of huts with running water, central heat, and a sauna.
For descriptions of everything in between, visit the huts web site

To the top of the peak

Friday and Saturday and Sunday are the last days this winter to ride the Pikes Peak Cog Railway. Even with all the snow, that little red train is going all the way to the top! It's a great way to see the peak in all its winter glory.
Take the late train, and you can catch the Adaman Club setting the New Year's Eve fireworks at the summit.

In Mirkwood Basin, where the powder lies

So Thursday I drove to Monarch to check out Mirkwood basin for the first time. This is the new mad vertical expert area Monarch added to the north of its existing runs. Just past Salida, as the photog (grapher) and I started to climb the pass, it started dumping. I don't mean, "oh look snowflakes" dumping. I mean jackknifed trucks and spinning Texans on the highway dumping.
We made it to Monarch anyway, but Mirkwood was closed.
"Too much snow," the guys at patrol said. "But it will be sick tomorrow."
That tomorrow is basically now: Friday.
No one is there.
Well, actually, a swarm of Texans are there, but they don't ski Mirkwood. They ski the greens, ya'll.
So....
If you can pull it off, go to Monarch now.
That is all.....

-Dave