082 | Berthoud Pass, Colorado

Now that I finally have a laptop, I can now be more thorough in keeping this blog updated. After skiing Berthoud Pass today, it's becoming more clear why I love what I do. There was never any doubt, but after strolling into work at 9:15am while enthusiastically sporting my bright red ski pants, I realized that I might be crazy. I might be crazy in the sense that I woke up at 4:30 in the morning to hike twenty-five minutes just to ski a few hundred feet of low-angle powder.

Nahhh ... I'm not crazy. I'm on vacation.

Life is good.



Really fucking good.











Musical support provided by High Contrast and his remix of Nancy Sinatra's "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang":





As I alluded to above, the day started promptly at 4:30 bright and too damn early, but there's absolutely no room for complaints.

By the time we started skinning up, it was 6:40 and twenty-five minutes later we found ourselves in awe of some amazing views. The sun was a bright pink while surrounding areas were much darker. Within minutes, the pink glow became contagious as the clouds lit up almost instantaneously as if God himself accidentally started a kitchen fire that overtook the entire house.

Pretty soon after we spent time spinning our heads in circles trying to catch all of of the kitchen fire, Hans and I dug a pit to assess the snowpack. We situated ourselves on a 16-degree slope facing northeast at treeline. Some photos are below.



Here you can see clearly the rotten base layer that was several inches deep. On top of that was 12-16" of newly-bonding dense snow that has been becoming more compacted since the recent storm over the weekend. While the pit showed no signs of encouragement to continue forward, we would be further down the slope and recent reports stated that the snow felt considerable stable.







Here's Hans performing a few tests on the snowpack to see how reactive it was:









We quickly made our way down around 7:45 through a cautious path to get back to the parking lot. While our turns were rather non-heroic, snow conditions and weather were hard to beat. It certainly was refreshing to see and feel the snow from the recent storm bonding together nicely for what we all hope will be a super stable base layer as the season progresses forward.



One last parting shot on the later portion of our adventure:



Click here to view more pictures and in larger size.




► Words to remember:

"Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee."

- Job 12:8