obvious

heres a shocker for ya.

ok, its snowing in the mtns the last couple days (none in the fort lenny) and its killing me. i was so close to calling in sick this a.m. this is killing me. whats worse is i bought new skis last weekend and have yet to try 'em out. argggghhhhh. trimmed the new skins last night - and managed to keep the dog hair off of the glue. no easy feat, i tell ya what. i think this weekend me and m. are going to go up to winter park and checkity-check it out. snow reports are looking pretty promising. stay tuned.

one thing that folks from other places (not co.) might not have heard about is that our state patrol has instituted a policy limiting the number of people who can go on organised rides (ms150, elephant rock century, bicycle tour of colorado, etc. and so forth) to 2500. yeah thats a lot of peeps, but some of these rides have consistently drawn 3000 people or more for years. i went on the elephant rock ride last spring and it was amazing to see that many people on the road. i was wishing i had a recording of "on your left" by the end of the day. regardless, capping participation is supposedly for "safety" reasons and can be arbitrarily lowered depending on a number of factors. basically without input from the organisers of said rides.

now i'm all for safety, but i think simply lowering the number of folks who can participate is not going to be the most effective thing to do. in my opinion, safety issues on these kinds of rides come about because of two things (this may get me in trouble, i dunno) - inexperienced cyclists as well as inexperienced motorists. yeah, lowering the amount of people who can go on the ride will remove the absolute number of idiots on bikes, but i would guess the proportion of freds bobbing and weaving all over the place will stay the same. and it does nothing to help on the motorist side, except to give them fewer targets. so what do we do? i suggest busting out a couple of the "E"s, particularly education and enforcment. how do we go about doing that? i dunno i gotta think about it. your suggestions are welcome.