This is the crew that i will be spending almost all of my time with in the rawah wilderness. Starting from top right, we have Tom, the crew leader, Ariana, Sarah, Sophie, Me and Joaquin. These photos are from last Wednesday, all the crews spent a day at a ropes course at the local YMCA.

 

Video

Heres a video that i took from our trip to A-basin, i camera work is a little sketchy, but if you have never tried to snowboard and film at the same time, it is kinda a pain. But heres what i got, enjoy.

Tom and i had an Epic day at A-basin today. tomorrow i start work and the fun slows down.

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When we pulled into the drive of the house, we look up and what do we see? This little guy, i believe its a coyote.

http://www.arapahoebasin.com/

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The day before Kristen left she and i went on a hike around Lilly Lake and played around with the camera.

I was sitting in my truck with Kristen waiting for her bus to come and pick her up. Suddenly my phone begins to ring. I look, it’s Tom, I pick the phone up, the first words out of his mouth are “wanna go skiing?” I say “yes” with out skipping a beat. Only then do I realize the consequences of my response. First its 3 pm and I am in Loveland, we had numerous hail storms through out the day, and there were 7 tornadoes that touched down earlier that day less then 5 miles away from where I was. But tom was in need of some good hard fun after being stuck in an office all day, so I agreed that we would evaluate the weather when I got back into town. So after I sent Kristen on her way, I drove back to the house, where I was to meet Tom. I arrived back at the house, waited about 10 min and I see the truck that Tom is in rolling down the drive.

 If you have never met Tom he is quite the character;  he is a very jumpy guy and loves anything that involves the great outdoors. When he gets out of the truck the first thing he says “ARE YOU READY”. The weather at that time had cleared enough for my comfort. When I say that, it was not raining at the time and it was pretty warm. There was still some very threatening looking clouds above us but being the ambitious characters we headed into the mountains. We planed on going to a bowl that was below Tombstone Ridge. It is located in Rocky Mountain National Park along Trail Ridge Road. It was about a 25 min drive from the house. When we arrived the clouds has lightened up a little bit and we ran into a local ski bum that had just skid the bowl himself. Tom got out and talked to the guy to find out the best way to get to top of the bowel. He said walk right up the bowl and you will be good. Walk is a generous term for the effort that Tom and I put in for this “walk”.

 The start of this walk was not so bad, it was just steep, but as we progressed further up the hill the wind picked up and it started snowing. So we walked and walked, with the wind in our face driving us back down the mountain. This hike was a true slog, at 11,500 feet above sea level our lungs were burning with the lack of oxygen. We continued to hike in these conditions for 35-50 minuets. When we reached the top it was cold, windy and still snowing on us. We took some time to truly enjoy where we were and what we were about to do.

 As we prepped to go on the run, I hear Tom start to swear his head off. Apparently his ski bindings were set to his other ski boots and they were not fitting into his boots properly. He looked at me desperately and asked if I had a ski tool. I regrettably do not. We start to think that we just busted our balls so tom could walk down. He then remembered that he had a knife in his bag, and  this provided enough of an edge so he could turn the screw and adjust the binding. We took a few quick pics and were finally ready to enjoy this spring snow. Before I know it Tom took off down the slope, I chased after him. There are no real words to describe the feeling of what it feels like to drop into a bowl that you just hiked up. Basically it is just the best snowboard run of your life. There is no greater high than what I was feeling as I linked turns back to back in the fresh spring snow. This is living, this is life.

Kristen and i Took an adventure to Boulder, super cool city, ill be going again soon.

Heres a good quote that i saw on a button while we were there

“Until a person is rated successful by there spirituality, morality and compassion and not material wealth, mankind will evolve no further.”

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f you follow the arrows, this was the route that tom and i did this past sunday