It's Ffffreeeeezing Up Here!

ite den. two pictures: a thermometer and john coltrane's blue train. not mutually exclusive but a nutty juxtaposition of two objects nonetheless...
okay. the thermostat displayed this number when i came home. the top number (in fahrenheit) is the interior number and the bottom number-the negative 4-is the outside temp. we're experiencing a three-day deep freeze up here at 8800 feet in sunny colorado in the middle of winter. yup. it's cold kids.
now coltrane...on the way home i stopped at my most favorite used cd joint near my work. i saw three artists-used that is-that might make the purchasing cut. they were: matthew sweet, modest mouse, and they might be giants. for grins and giggles i check out the used jazz, and lo and behold mr. coltrane whispers, "buy me machmoud!" not only is it blue train (arguably mr. coltrane's second-most popular album done in the hard bop sound), but it was re-mastered in 1997 by rudy van gelder (notice the rudy van gelder print on the spine of the cd?)-blue note's most accomplished sound engineer. ole rudy had the penchant for recording resulting in a warm yet brilliant sound at the expense of the piano's sound. all this sonic righteousness for the $6.99. oooo-weeee! now that's why i love this place. brrrrr. i better tend the fire kids....

WinterPark

hey kids, went to winterpark w/ alec today. my kharma must be good because today was another exceptional day. we parked in the mary jane side, a stone's throw away from the lift. alec had a two for one lift pass coupon he cashed-in and for $40, it's world class ski-action. the only bummer about the winterpark side of the mountain is that there's a butt-load of poling to do because some of the stretches of the runs are almost flat. it's even worse for the knuckle dragging snowboarders because they can't skate ski. the colorado ski country has been getting pounded the last couple of months and alec and i benefited from mother nature's bountiful precipitation. after we get our ski legs in we head up to the top of parsenn bowl. we don't ski down parsenn because the high winds have just baked the topmost layer of snow into this concrete/ice hybrid. instead we hit the gladed area to the left of it. we're talking about thigh-high untouched powder (we waited in line like the rest of the powder hounds for several minutes to the only lift that goes up there). how to describe it is like skiing on fluffy, deep, packaging popcorn balls. it was very light and our skis were floating midway up on the surface. the faster you go the higher your skis float. either way it was nutty because you really don't touch the bottom, it's this nutty, almost giddy, floaty feeling coupled with the tactile disconnect with what you're expecting mentally from the contour of the perceived surface. i did a lot of hopping to ensure both skis tracked and i'm sure we had a stuporific, copraphage-esque grin on our windburnt mellons. also mind you, that while we're descending this fluffy mental disconnect, it's in this cute little glade of trees. not officially tree banging but in wide avenues between groves. okay, so now we go back up to the parsenn bowl because alec thinks that the flipside has bowls so we ski, skate ski, and slide-step uphill to get a nice drop-in. we ask a guy in front of us if there's a bowl in this new area of winterpark and he says, "no, just trees and deeeeep snow." holee mackeral. now we're officially tree banging in snow up to our ding-a-lings. it's deeeeeeep and the trees keep us honest. in this part you really can't do wide s turns, or else you'll smack a tree and worse you'll be a skiing statistic. the best strategy is to go straight and scrub speed if you can't see an exit route (i.e. a tree dead-end) to the bottom. once we hit the flat part, it's so pristine that we follow lines depressed in the powder from previous skiers to get out. from this point, we're basically cross-country skiing-using as much energy from poling as we do skate skiing to get out. it's completely otherworldly. it looks like a scene from grimms' fairy tale with these crazy looking branches ripe for bursting with all the accumulated snow on it and powder snow (again, up to our ding-a-lings) on either side of the route. wow. it's almost spiritual it's so surreal and amazingly sunny.
doing this takes us to noon. we're getting pooped out so we ski mary jane again with a run alec spies that has both moguls and a bail-out. we hit the moguls and this is what i notice about our styles. alec keeps his upper body pretty silent and slide-bangs the turns. i ski like i'm galloping on a horse and tail slide the bottoms of the bumps to scrub speed. i find a line that will bounce me the least. it's like picking a technical line on a hardtail versus point and shooting on a dual suspension. if you compare our overlap in the venn diagram of styles though, our overlap is this: exhaustion. it's like doing squats, coupled with a 400m track event. completely anaerobic effort. we smile, but boy our legs are busted. we figure three more runs of this pain and pleasure principle and we're outty. sho 'nuff, we bail. we bail only after we hit a local coffee house and our barrista puts some loving into well crafted pieces of latte (long live esspresso-type drinks!).on the way back home we surround ourselves with conversation and a debrief of what we did and a summary of how our school year's going (he's a colleague as well). we talk about early red hot chili peppers, jam to some feist, and some gorillaz. we're batting a thousand on sublime ski outtings complimented with quality homey hangtime...

A Nice Surprise from a Long Day!

went on a sort of training ride today. a HUGE front was blowing in today and one of my best friends and teammate, kenny, and i decided to start our ride then. it's almost the height of winter here and we recently had a warming trend. all the accumulated snow is now melting and it's like little rivulets on our normal cycling routes. the picture is what we had to deal with on some of the roads. not too much of a pain if you're prepared. gear like fenders, a boat-load of clothes and base layer, decent tires, good gloves...etc. can make for a tolerable riding shindig near freezing temps (but it was in the 40s when we left!). before we leave, i check kenny's new turntable out. kenny has a pretty nice stereo and when he plays the lps it just sounds lovely. it's enough to make one buy vacuum tube stereo amplification. he plays some cheap trick and some rush before we go. it was a quick time travel back to the days of the mullet, member's only jacket, parachute pants, and kaepa hightops where you cuffed your pants. okay, i digress. we leave his house after we cross a slush-field of once upon a time ice. the front created these nasty winds. we work our way out his little valley with a climb and a nice headwind keeps us honest. to keep us even more honest we're getting self-inflicted spray from our front tires hitting our shins and feet (rear fenders only don't help). this water's cold too! we have booties on to kinda keep our feet water resistant. so we fight the wind for an hour and decide we can go on for another hour if the streets are this wet. the cold's cutting through me and kenny knows of a place that serves some pretty banging coffee. my blood sugar's low so instead of a doppio (a double espresso) i order an italian soda so the sugar can get into my blood quicker. i also order a pastry just to make sure. man that helped. by this time the sun's ducking behind the mountains and i'm running out of clothes. i put on my pvc rain jacket to keep me warm and it does the trick. not very breathable but at least i'm warm. once we get back to his house, kenny gives me a ride in his volvo. you say a volvo? well, this is one highly modified 740 wagon that turbocharged with too many modifications to list. if you're interested he's on my favorite links. check it out. anyhoo once we're on the streets and it's po-po free he lights it up and all 500 horses are unleashed (that's right 500! got it verified at the dyno). he lives near my brother in-law so we go pick him up for a very truncated cruise session in lovely westminster. it was a nice way to punctuate a high-effort day. i'll have to wash my bike later...
so here's the surprise: when i get home i find a good friend of mine-from my air force days-left me a comment on the previous blog. i contact him and we exchange digits for future reference. he's a walking blog entry for sure. quite a character with a heart of gold. we did a lot of gastronomically, spiritually, socially enlightening things when we were usaf europe.
here's another sidebar from today. i subscribe to new york public radio's radiolab podcast (thanks alec) and the latest one is on the fanaticism and myth of wagner's ring series. it was a very enlightening primer on wagner, his use of the leitmotif, brief character study, other wagner-esque nuances any music lover would respect and appreciate. to sum the ring, as quoting jad the host of wnyc's radiolab "the ring is a german, romantic view of norse and teutonic myth influenced by greek tragedy and a buddhist sense of destiny told with a socio-political deconstruction of contemporary society. a psychological study of motivation in action and a blueprint for a new approach to music and theatre." now wouldn't that get you hooked? tomorrow team m goes to a birthday party my middle daughter got invited to.

"Who wants to go skiing? Raise your hand!"*

*that's what my kids say when they have something nobody in their immediate circle of friends have and want to make sure-with perfect clarity-that that immediate circle of friends are 100% absent of that something. try it sometime, it'll make you feel...mmmmm...'bout seven or so years of age.
oh yeah. call me lazarus. i was dead (due to a super-nasty flu-type buggy-bug my brother in-law via my sweet melissa gave me), and now i'm alive (but it took 4not 3 days)! so what do you do the first day when you can leave your bed? that's right, you go skiing. skiing on a weekday nonetheless. skiing at copper mountain. i leave pretty early because i have this thing about being (one of the) first(s) in line when the lifts start running at 8:30. there was absolutely nobody there this morning so i warmed up mid-mountain back to base a couple of times to make sure my skis, legs, and brain were acting like a team. my lungs predicated the rest of my time on the mountain (unfortunately). i still have a boatload of phlegm sitting nicely in the bottommost chambers of my lungs...so!.. even though my pistons were willing to get abused, the limiting reagents were my lungs. i have residual fitness from cycling (i'd like to think. okay, i thought about it, and there's absolutely no crossover) in the legs but it felt as if i had a tracheal opening the size of a lilliputian's sphincter (coupled with da phlegm). not a good combination for anaerobic activities. i'd rip a good line, but when a quarter of the sequence i was visioning happened, i'd have to catch a nice, long breather (being proprietarily sound, i didn't exhibit behaviors of extruding liquid shrapnel from the naso-pharynx passageways either). that's when the octogenarians would pass me. i'm not busting on them, it's just the long time locals tearing it up too (i want to be skiing in my twilight years!). i hit the bowls before the crowds got nutty. the karmas love plowing through the semi-chunky, nougat-esque powder/packed powder. too bad i was slowing them down. i'll let you in on a secret: my skis, as well as my bikes (my mountain bike mostly), talk to me. they are the iconic devils that sit on an opposing shoulder to the angel when you have a choice between moderation and full-on indulgence. sadly, i had to stop in-between evil sessions in order to breathe properly. breathing's important for like, aerobic creatures.
on the way back-especially when you fly solo-i go through a mental debrief. what fosters the mental decompression is music. i've been on this wagner bender lately so i listen to his the ring of the nibelungs. to be precise, it's his first one: das rheingold (which, in german means, das rheingold-actually the nibelung is about 16 hours long). incidentally, i've been to the rhein river in wunderbar deutschland (but can honestly say that mosel wine is superior in taste and finish). and after sampling several of the rhine's best auslese (with french fries mit mayonnaise, yum!)i too have seen rheinmaidens in der rhein. wagner's music is large and in charge; but, his arias can be immensely impassioned. every time wotan busts a solo i'm getting chicken skin. including this, my outing to copper mountain was truly audio-visual.
ite den kids. have a lovely 2008 and if you see anybody in a vitamin cottage cycling kit, y'all wave to them with all your fingers, ite? ite.

Christmas break '07

here's the moose playing with his thomas the train, trainset-made of real wood (that's what the box said)! he was in the play zone. christmas was pretty cool this year. very mellow, we didn't have to travel anywhere and the kids were pretty happy with what they received (even though we try and enforce to them that receiving stuff isn't nearly as important as giving stuff-note to self: good luck with that!). the weather has been pretty typical december weather up at 8800'. had to run the atv with the blade attachment several times. no biggy. right now though, the weather forecasters are saying we might receive 8" of snow today. christmas day, my in-laws and brother in-law and melissa's uncle and niece came down. it was a lot of fun. i taught her niece how to operate the atv and she plowed our driveway (her idea of fun). for entertainment, we played with maricel's dance dance revolution. or as maura calls it, "dance dance elution". melissa's cousin put on a dancing demonstration as we were no where close to her high scores. grandma busted a jig too. it was pretty fun hanging out with them. today, melissa's home sick and we're chilling with single digit temperatures all around us. that's okay because i stocked up on wood the night before and yours truly already started a nice, rip-roaring fire this morning. my birthday's round the corner too, y'all got anything for me?

First ski of the season with Alec @ Keystone

woa. again, the holy trinity of skiing (christians, forgive me...) with my homey, alec. which is: no lines, blue skies, and fresh powder (i can't stand it when people call powder pow-pow, makes 'em sound like poseurs). we left 6'ish from the evergreen park and ride expecting some hellish road conditions. it was icy. some numnuts in an lx 470 was sitting shotgun in the center median, high curbed by the snow, before the eisenhower tunnel. so i never exceed 55 mph all the way from evergreen and we arrive at the lot, right next to the red river entrance, with an hour to spare. i couldda hokked a loogy from my truck and it would've hit the gondola we were so close. dats right. we had a small breakfast at a joint called inkspot before the breakfast crowd came in. while eating, we talked about how out-of-the-box-thinking and sonically eccentric russian composers were and alec revealed he was into stravinski. the only stravinski i knew were the rite of spring and the firebird suite. pretty erratic and uniquely russian, no sing-songy stuff here.
anyhoo my first day on my new skis, the volkl karma's, and we head straight over to the outback. my first run consisted of ungroomed, fluffy powder, where i fell straightaway and had to have alec help me up because it was kinda deep. not a good start to get your skiing legs to have the ski-feel.
alec's sick day is equal to my normal ski day and that was the case today. even then when we were hitting the runs he attacked it like fat albert in line at country buffet. i kinda make my s-turns in no particular haste but we arrive at the same place with aplomb usually. that boy can ski.
the slopes had a power outage so the lifts were running on diesel. not the normal.
okay my skis. i was pleasantly surprised. alec has the k2 analog (public enemy) to my ski, so he told me of her characteristics in certain conditions and what type of effort i need to put her on edge (which is little effort). she was awesome. alec also said that it's confident on icy patches. sho'nuff it was. it's an exceptional ski and for the quasi powder in the bumps it was bulldozer-like pushing the extraneous hydrogen hydroxide out of my fall line. amazingly maneuverable in the bumps, and is escalade-like in the groomers. lovely it was.
as the day progressed, we were in chill mode and we were practicing our backwards skiing taking advantage of the twin tips. around 12:30 with alec's aerobic capacity cut in half with his cold and my legs made of balsa wood we bailed after a spirited run down red river-icy patches and all.
i like hanging with alec, he's a young kid ahead of his peers' years, can hang with any conversational permutation, and the girls dig him. the trip back to evergreen was slow and we listened to new stuff from our ipods. i was particularly intrigued by his band called sea and cake.
pictured are my inner boots liberated from their shells so that everything can dry so no mold or dry rot'll occur once they sit again for another coon's age until i can go skiing again. i've never had a bad day with alec. check out my previous blog tomfoolering with alec last ski season in breck.

Global Warming?

it's the 17th of november and i just got back from a 3h screamin' off-road ride with my homies. maybe the accelerated warming due to man is delaying the usual cold fronts and precipitation totals associated with november, but jeez-i guess i'll take it for now. met hez-chilly, alec, kenny, kevin, and johnx2 at the lower parking lot at white ranch this morning for the long loop workout. it was the moab group part two. you know what the nice parts of the moab trip was for me? it's mostly the conversations we have going in-between rides; and post-ride debriefs. usually billy and i walk from the hotel to downtown and back and our spectrum of topics hit the range of nutty to spiritual to downright man-gossip. it's a good mix of personalities i'm telling ya! it was really nice seeing them again, and to ride, it was dee-luxe. if i was a snotnose twenty year-old competitive cyclist, with no familial or temporal obligations this would be another perfunctory ride (because i'd be riding 4 days/week), but most of us are married with pumpkins or in a committed relationship, so to congregate for the main purpose of riding, it truly is special (dare i say: magical?).
it was chilly so i left the leg and arm warmers on. alec led the way to the whippletree cutoff. he seemed to be going quicker than his usual pace, so he's reaching a new, physiological plateau. poor kenny was battling a fever and a rush to get home to finish painting irene-his 500 horsepowered volvo wagon. you should read his blog. check out links i frequent. there's actually two climbs to get to the backside of white ranch-to a trail called wrangler. so, after alec's legs say to the group wassup now, i guess it's billy's (legs) turn to say wassup now 'cept a wee bit louder. today, he was an exceptional cleaning machine. holy mackerel, it was like he was busting a textbook display on how to clean obstacles. it was to impressive, needless to say, watching billy pass me when i dab'd. on the backside i missed john (from moab) and kev take a digger. it's a pretty technical downhill where you have to thread the needle pretty carefully. the tree roots are all off camber and there's always a tree directly across big boulders. so if you take a bad line, or slide on a root you're going to be doing an impression of the human pinball. sometimes the collisions are elastic, sometimes they're not. drag. it's common courtesy that when i crash i would like to see somebody crash as well-at least for the free entertainment value. the other john crashed as wel and when we waited at a trail junction his knee was a nice, streaming crimson. i guess it's officially a ride now...
when we finally cross the upper parking lot and descend back into the lower parking area, kev takes off. it's mostly a fireroad down so the lines aren't too sketchy but boy the babyheads just flat out suck for hardtails. kev was supersonic but i was determined to keep him at least within three or four car lengths of yours truly. if there weren't any hikers i swear we would've broken our pr's down the hill. kev was launching off the little bumps and clear about 20 or so feet of ground everytime. it looked like fun so i did the same except i didn't bunnyhop (compress both my arms and legs) as aggressive as kevin, cleared about the same distance over the ground, but didn't get the cool, visual gap between tires and ground. nutty. at this point you never mentally think about crashing, only watching the person's line in front of you. kev takes some nasty lines and gets away with it seamlessly because he has a dual boinger as well as skill(s). i still have to thread the needle ever so often and it scrubs my speed (boohoo!). at the last creek crossing, it's billy, kev, and me. once the posse reforms, billy says, "you know the secret of the rock garden?". i say, "you hit it fast." truly that's 90 percent of mt biking. you hit the obstacle fast enough so that you roll over it; plus, low speed crashes hurt. a lot! so at the rock garden, billy picks his way while i dab. so now it's kev, billy, and me racing to the last cattle gate. billy hears me bearing down on him and he kicks it. i yell, "get him [kev]!" kev hears this and kicks it twice as hard and that's how it finishes. no one passed nobody. it was a great ride in the company of great people. like the saying goes: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. this groups elevates everybody else socially and physically. can't beat that...
afterwards alec and i bust a lunch in morrison. he eats a meatball sub; i, a phat piece o' greasy cheese pizza washed down with mt. dew. did i mention this ride was the shizzle?
the title picture represents the speed this group has whenever somebody gets a wild hair in their (downhill) a$$ (read: kev).