coal miners long johns: 34, 35, 36

took advantage of the long weekend and got out for three more great days on the skis. a full day at loveland on friday set me up for two days of backcountry on sat./sun. my buddy kingsley and i were contemplating a run at the summit of clark peak on sat., but thought better of it due mainly to the 10" of new snow that had fallen in the cp area the previous 24hrs. not that new snow is a bad thing (at all!!!) but breaking trail for 6 miles to reach the summit through 10" of fresh would've made a planned long day even longer. so we'll hold off on that one for a couple weeks. we ended up going into rocky mtn. national park to an area called chaos canyon. kingsley talked me into skiing an unnamed (to our knowledge) couloir off of the southeast face of hallet peak we skinned up the bottom third and then resorted to boot packing. i didn't do the full shot but kingsley did. he ripped it actually. me, i was gripped but managed to get down without killing myself. then we did some more mellow meadow skipping before exiting the canyon back to the bear lake trailhead. great day in the park. so great in fact that we made plans to do it again on sunday, this time with chris p. in attendance.

i woke up yesterday feeling the turns in my legs from the previous two days. i was laying in bed thinking about bailing actually. i thought i'd do some things around the house and then go on a bike ride in the afternoon. but that was before i looked out the window and saw 3"-4" of fresh snow in the yard, which ruled out the bike ride. somehow i found the motivation to rally and got ready. chris p. came by around 7:45 and we headed around the reservoir over to kingsley's to pick him up. turns out chris was in the same place mentally as i was - tired and not too motivated. got to kingsleys' house and he admitted that his legs were pretty shot from the day before. so there we were the three of us, sort of grumbling at various frequencies as we piled into the truck.

at any rate, we made it up to rmnp again and found .... about 6"-8" of freshy fresh pow pow. and no wind. which makes for quite nice skiing, actually ;). suddenly we were enthused about the day. back into chaos canyon for some sweet sweet turns. an interesting thing that we discovered was a bad-ass igloo/winter camping spot that this gentleman ed had fashioned. he has invented this device that makes constructing these shelters quick and easy. kingsley and i had run into him the day before on our way out of the canyon and after chatting with him awhile kind of had an idea of where we might find his latest build. i might have to go up there and spend the night one of these weekends.

so we kicked it around the igloo for a bit then did some meadow skipping for a few hours. then back out the exit known as the "rocky mountain terrain park". in the end we were all super stoked that we didn't bag the day and got after it.

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