Gooney Riders

Ode to Teachers

A funny thing happened tonight.  I hung out at the Sun with my sixth grade science/home room teacher.  I hadn't seen her for well over a decade.

I knew it was an inevitable meeting.  When my dork of a brother won Pan Am's in fencing last summer, he made the front page of the sports section of the Daily Scamera.  Teacher recognized the last name, told her fiancee that she knew me, who turns out was good friends with Uncle Vee and had the same conversation with him, and it all eventually came back to me.  It's a small world we live in.

So, accidentally, we met up at the bar tonight.  Closing out Stout Month, complements of a leap year.

In my mind, she hadn't changed.  There was no hesitation in recognition. It was really neat.

She nearly failed me in sixth grade science.  I, to this day, blame it on my lab partner who said she was going to type up the lab report on snails but didn't.  I worked my tail off the rest of the quarter and I think I pulled my grade up to a B- after a parent-teacher conference.  (I very nearly failed pre-calc in highschool too...but that was because I refused to memorize trig functions.  What a stupid waste of brain space.) But it was one of the first kicks in the rear that not everything in life was going to go exactly as planned.

Well, maybe one of the firsts was when I was caught running around the halls during lunch by my fifth grade teacher, Ms. Foss, yelling, 'run, run, the Fossil is coming!'  We hid in the bathroom.  She found us.  I don't know if my parents knew about that one.

In hindsight, teachers are pretty amazing.  To put up with hundreds upon thousands of kids like myself, in a hormonally challenged state thrown together in a school for eight hours at a time, hoping for survival, and to try to steer them in the right direction in life...now that's a challenge I don't think I'd ever be able to step up to.

I've been lucky with my teachers. The McGinni in highschool inspired everyone to go out and do great things while exploring and having fun, my calc teacher who was such a strong woman she didn't take shit from anyone, my anatomy teacher who coined the phrase (at least in my mind) of 'sounds like a personal problem to me' and plenty of others...I think I got lucky.

It's funny, thinking back, I remember far more of my highschool teachers than I do my college professors.  Somewhere in there, there's a level of caring.

Thursday

Shhhh....don't tell my advisor.
Woke up to howling winds in the Bubble, a front door blown wide open, general misery if you know what I mean. 

Went skiing with M&M regardless and after a weak attempt at a storm while driving over the pass, the sky cleared up to beautiful bluebird.

Ended up being one of those days where it very nearly took us longer to get down each run than to get up it.  Two reasons for this, we were absolutely hauling on the way up, at one point of time covering 1000 vert in half an hour with me being cross-eyed most of the way.  Gotta move fast when people have to be back at work.  In comparison, TetonAT just posted from Europe during the Randonee World Championships that the top guy in the vertical race covered 2871 feet in just a hair over 35 minutes.  Yeah, I'm a geek, I like numbers.  The other reason for our even ascent/descent time was RedCoat's photography.

Absolutely amazing.

It's the last of Colorado powder RC will see this season, though I realized I'm not going to feel too bad for him because we've got a weekend in Utah slated in two weeks and a week in Jackson in a month...and then he'll be back for a bit of Chris' couloir tour in May...it's a hard life we live.

Chris' stuff

The boy is taking an animation class this semester. I think it's pretty damn neat.  Largely because I'd never have the imagination or patience to put together something like this.

Major bummer, dude (again)

I was starting to feel like I had too many bikes for a while...a townie, a road bike, a cross bike, a 29er mountain bike, a 26er mountain bike frame, a 26er SS mountain bike, a 26 x 24 frame, a TT frame (I'm selling this, I swear, as soon as I get around to it), a massive cruiser from the 1940's.  I wanted to pare it down to a townie, a cross bike, and a mountain bike.  Well, maybe keep the SS mountain bike around for bad weather commuting. 

If I keep breaking bikes at the rate I'm going, I'll be well below my goal in no time.  Today's casualty, the roadie.  Well, really only the fork, as I managed to drop it, sans front wheel on the floor of our garage.  Adios straight dropouts that fit nicely over a wheel.  This leaves me with my SS, my townie, and my mountain bike, which I don't have pedals for because the pedals are stuck on the crank I pulled off the destroyed cross bike.

Felt awesome to be fully chamoised up ready to ride, only to realize that in a garage full of bikes, not a single one was functional for anything besides getting to school.

Pretty stoked on the situation.

Not.

Maybe I'll bring a sixpack home tonight and propose to Chris that I'll trade him beer if I can borrow the fork off his road bike for a little while.  Then, when I get the new cross bike, the roadie will officially be retired.

It's been a good 2008 so far, down one frame and two forks in the bike department, and one core shot plus two major dings on the topsheets of my skis.  Worst part is, all except the core shot and maybe one of the dings could have been avoided if only a paid a little more attention to myself on a second to second basis.

Doh!

Steamboat

If I had to choose one picture for the weekend, this would be it.

Luckly, I don't have to choose just one.

I have to admitt, on Friday night I was bumming on the trip up to the Steamboat yurt.  Plenty of work to do, a long drive, and packing for anything like this is generally a pain.  The weekend just reinforced what I already knew, must to keep exploring, seeing new places, doing new things, meeting new people.  In the end, it's well worth any agony that goes into preparing.

Spent the weekend in a yurt about 30 miles north of Steamboat in the shadow of Farwell Mountain.  Drove up late Friday night, hiking (10 minutes) into the yurt around 11pm.  You always hope that when in a new place, the skies clear and you can get a good view of the surroundings.  I guess this weekend, we found we hadn't made the proper sacrafices to the weather dieties.  It didn't stop the boys from jumping off of stuff.

I think over the course of the two days, we got 2 hours of clear, and none of those were while we were on the top of the mountain.  Lucky for us, we weren't in any particulary scary avy terrain and even in a whiteout, life never got too sketchy.

Jason, part time avy forcaster, part time bike courier came along.  Dug a pit, did some snow science.

It'd be interesting to dig more pits as the season progresses.  I can fully understand that they aren't representative enough and maybe aren't that useful when evaluating terrain to ski, but they sure are interesting.

Steamboat is known for it's aspen skiing.  I love aspen skiing.  Maybe it's the tree bootcamp the boys have put me through the past month that I'm liking trees more, but I think I prefered the aspens this weekend to the wide open slopes we found.  Strange.

Interesting snow this weekend.  Definite dust on crust, but when the dust is 4-6 inches deep and light as can be, we weren't about to complain. Even if the weather was maybe not ideal.

Every once in a while the skies would clear.  Talk about a view.  Jason got the money shot for the weekend.  Chris got the 'how does he survive?' shot.  Me thinks Karhu could make an entire sales brochure using only the bottoms of Chris' skis.

A few more pictures because I can...

One of the best parts of the area was the skin back to the yurt across an open lake.  Don't get to do that very often and it provided for some of the best lighting of the trip. Nan's pants, worn by Chris, provided the brightest light of the trip.

So maybe I over did the pictures...I blame it on RedCoat, he took too many nice ones.

Weekend Vid

Chris was supposed to be writing a paper on the drive back from Steamboat this weekend.  Instead, he put this together. While I'm not promoting slacking, I'm sorta glad he did.

3 days, 3 rides

So, I'm not going to leave squirrel porn on the top of the blog for the entire weekend.  It was funny though.  Instead, a picture for RedEvan.  A van we saw at the base of Teton Pass a month and a half ago.  There are weirdo's everywhere.

A shift in life mentality happened for me this week.  Instead of, 'I really should get out for a run, I'll feel tons better afterwards' which I've been battling with for the past month (mid winters are hard for me with the general lack of sun, regardless of how much I get out on the weekends) I've been totally stoked to play hooky in the afternoons and go riding.  It might have something to do with the lack of wind as well...

They say you never forget how to ride a bicycle.  I beg to differ.  Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, I did happen to more than double my number of rides so far in 2008 in the span of three days, but gawd it was hard to pedal at any functional rate at first.  And pedaling circles?  That required constant attention.  RedCoat claims that when he got out riding last week, he felt like a rockstar.  I'm going to blame it on him having nearly a decade more muscle memory for pushing pedals than I do. 

In all honesty, I was starting to get a little worried.  Maybe I should have made an effort to ride my bike more than once a month all winter...hmmm.  But, by the third ride, I was starting to get back into the swing of things.  I miss my cross bike more than anything, but I think most trails are still snow covered, so it's not a bad time to reconnect with the roadie, go see the buffalo out on Nelson, the shooting range on Lefthand, and the never ending suburbia development on 75th.   Plus, I got an iPod for Christmas, which not only brings me firmly into the 21st century, but makes for a great riding partner as well.

Spring is on the way

I felt a little guilty watching...sort of like a peep show early in the morning.

The best part is, squirrels cuddle when they're done.  Well, they sit, and then the girl squirrel gives herself a bath and the boy squirrel sits there comatose.  We're not so different after all.

Vid 2

Some days we ski like rockstars.  Other days, like complete idiots.  Presenting a compilation of what we really look/act like 90% of the time...especially when the camera is out.

Do we deserve this?

This blog (at least on the weekends) has been a chance for me to showcase the wonderful photography and video skills of my friends.  I have none of the above, but that's okay.

After a bit of confusion between 7pm or 7 am and between getting up high or finding nice powder trees, we managed to pull our lives together and headed to Condo Stash, RedEvan with a metal detector in tow, hoping to find the helmet cam that we lost in the snow last weekend.

No luck on the helmet cam, but the rest of us got a nice half hour lunch break halfway up the hill.  The snow was fast, if not super light and fluffy, and I managed to discover a new emotional issue with hitting the rear of my long wheelbase skis on trees as I went by.

After two runs, the girls won the grace and style photo contest with Red (not RedCoat, nor RedEvan, just Red) winning the contest outright, and the boys won the sheer, umm, let's call it the lack of worry about personal safely contest.

But in all honesty, they really can ski. Or at least thrown themselves off of stuff.

RedCoat brought along kickwax for the way out.  I think it cut our egress time and frustration levels in half.

Then it snowed.  And snowed some more.  And we went skiing the next day.

After two runs down our normal Krusty Stash, we explored.  Well, not really explored, but got the chance to ski a slope that RedCoat's been eyeing up and talking about all season...we got to ski it in Jackson Hole-esque powder.  For a slope aspect that probably shouldn't even have snow on it, we got 1200 feet of wide open powder turns and another 400 of gully skiing.  It was too good to pass up, so we rallied, and up we went in the fading light.

Another day of approaching the 6,000 vert in a day goal.  Still 485 ft short when daylight ran out.  Left the carrot dangling instead of eeking out the last bit on Warren Miller.  It was too good of a day to end it on a sub par run.  So I need at least one more giant day this season to hit 6,000.  Anyone interested?

RedCoat has more pictures.  I'd say he likes his new camera.