What I Did on My Winter Vacation, Part III: Copper Mountain

The drive from Monarch to Frisco and Copper Mountain was the most intense 104-mile drive of my life. It took three hours. During the trip I probably saw about five total miles of bare pavement, the rest was all ice-encrusted. I’ve been living in Oklahoma for the last three years; this was not an environment for which I’ve had a lot of recent experience. My goal for most of the drive was that, when they got close enough to see my plates, the Coloradans would back off a little and say to themselves, well, for an Oklahoman, he’s actually doing okay.

Anyway. Most of the roads looked like this:

Okay, so this was actually the road to Monarch from Salida a couple days earlier. But the coverage in the oncoming lane was about what it was from Salida all the way to Frisco. The actual highway isn’t pictured because I had way too tight a grip on the wheel, and I was a little too focused to be breaking the camera out.

Also, traffic was really bad through Buena Vista (a town in Colorado).

By the time I got to Leadville, I really had to use the restroom, so I took this shot from the gas station:

One of the ancillary problems with being sketched out by the road conditions is that the drive itself was (probably) really pretty. I took little notice.

And then I got to Leadville, elevation 10,151′. Cool mining town that was featured in one of my favorite non-fiction books, Making of a Hardrock Miner. But also: 10,151′! Leaving town, then, there’s a sign that says that the actual high point of the pass is still several miles ahead. That was Fremont Pass, elevation 11,318′. Holy carp, Colorado. This was early January, snow covered, storm on the way in, and you got your 11,000-foot passes wide open. Equal parts intimidating and impressive.

Also, and just to be clear, the road conditions weren’t a problem for my Jeep. Nervousness was 100% on me. No, I’m not just being an enabler for my car.

Then I was in Frisco. My brother Garry got there that same night, having driven down from South Dakota. He was there for five days and I was there for seven. I got five days in at Copper out of those seven, which is pretty good for me. Snow was decent on Saturday, then pretty close to excellent for all the other days. Copper does a great job of spreading people out even on high-traffic days.

What else?

This was on, I think, the Monday. Garry has since forsaken the yellow jacket. RIP.

Here’s a panorama shot I thought was decent from the top of the mountain. It’s the Rendezvous lift at left and the top of Blackjack at right.

Copper had added a really good barbecue place at the center village base. The food looked like this:

I mean, once it was mostly eaten.

On the Tuesday on our way up there, it had snowed so much overnight that they closed the freeway between Copper and Vail, yielding traffic that looked like this:

It cost us about 15 minutes.

The skiing was pretty amazing after that. One of the great oddities of Copper Mountain is that, while most of its visitors are families and intermediate skiers, they also have a lot of interesting terrain available. So, even though it was a powder day and there were plenty of people on the mountain’s front-side, Copper has this backside that seems utterly forgotten and where, therefore, there’s still plenty of good snow long after it’s been skied off on the front side. The two chairs back there are slow two-seaters, but whatever: it’s kind of nice to have a long ride between runs to help you catch your breath.

At lunch on the Thursday of that week, given similar snow conditions, I composed the following.

Blackjack, January 12, 2017

Orange slow and lonesome:
With a snow specter’s howl,
I ski you knees-deep.

So there was that.

Staying in Frisco was a good bet once the condo’s owner got the maids to actually come. Condo had a good view of snow, particularly the snow that kept piling up in the parking lot.

It was a good place at a decent price (once it was split among two people). It also made abundantly clear to me that my house in Oklahoma is just way, way too big. This place in Frisco was a 2BR, three-story townhouse (the first floor was the one-car garage, the second floor was the kitchen and living room, and the third was the two bedrooms), and despite being out of breath every time I climbed a flight of stairs (Frisco elevation: 9,075), it seemed a more comfortable living arrangement than what I have in Norman.

Man, but I will not miss this place.

Frisco is a cool, if perhaps fake, town. Fake in the sense that it exists mostly as a place for tourists to rent condos. It was probably a real mining town once or something. They have a nice, fake main shopping area, though, where Garry and I got Cajun food that tasted good and sat bad. That — that was about the extent to which we interacted with Frisco, unless you count the trip to the Safeway and the outdoor goods store where Garry bought a pair of pants.

Then Garry took off for home, and then I took off for home.

My drive back was during the weekend of The Great South Plains Ice Storm of ’17. Kansas geared up for it by painting wet-look stripes all over I-70.

Of course, then, on that Saturday when everyone who ventured out doors was predicted to spontaneously implode due to contact with ground ice, the temperatures never really got below 35. It was kind of nice — given all the bitter prognostications from the weather-industrial complex, there was no one on the freeways and I was free to cruise largely unmolested. I hope for more such ice storms in the future and will doubt forever the integrity of weathermen.

And that was my winter vacation. Now you know.

bkd

What I Did on My Winter Vacation, Part II: Taos and Monarch

From the greater Phoenix area, I headed back the way I came, up that one highway that probably has a number toward Holbrook. It was still pretty:

Although it also spat snow somewhere in those mountains, a true harbinger of the two weeks to come. Which is good, since I cannot abide a false harbinger.

I spent New Year’s Eve sleeping at an Air B&B place. It was like a casita at a hacienda about a mile and a half from the Taos Wal-Mart, which is not a super-center, because the city wouldn’t let them build a super-center there (I learned this while in Taos). Snowed maybe a half-inch that night (I was sleeping, it was fine), then I went…

Wait, key point in here: part of this winter break was motivated by the fact that last April I bought a 2016-17 season pass for Copper Mountain, which comes with three free days skiing at certain places, including Taos and Monarch.

Right, so then on New Year’s Day I skied at Taos. Most of the state of Texas was still there (excepting Shamrock).

It wasn’t skiing great, but it was a first ski day of the year. Alarmingly, it turned out that New Year’s Day was a blackout day for my reciprocal season pass, meaning I ended up having to pay money like a sucker. Also, even after you take the tram from the parking lot to the lifts, you still have to walk another 500 yards to get to the actual lifts. So hard. I didn’t go there to get exercise.

Anyway, I ended up calling my Aunt Debbie who lives in Taos and met up with her and Uncle Paul for dinner that night (as well as breakfast the next morning). It was good. Had some great New Mexican food at Guadalajara and more New Mexican breakfast at Michael’s. I’m not sure why I’m choosing this point to start shouting out restaurants in my blog, but here we are. I met Michael while we were at Michael’s, as well as his wife who insisted that I looked a lot like her nephew, particularly due to the beard. I don’t get that very often, so I enjoyed the novelty.

^^ My Aunt Debbie and I. I’m on the right.

Debbie also helpfully instructed me on the right way to pronounce the name of the town I was heading to next, Salida, pronounced Sa-LY-da as if the Spanish language weren’t actually a thing. It turns out it was named after the Spanish word salida, meaning exit. Coloradans!

Well anyway, drove from Taos up to Salida. I’ve driven that road at least a couple times before, but only in summer. It’s way cooler/prettier with some snow on it.

And then I rolled into Salida. I stayed at the… I dunno. Salida-Monarch Inn? Something like that. It was a good value motel that appeared to be owned by someone with a pretty grand vision for interior decoration (relative to value motels). Just saying that it was way more stylish than any budget motel I’ve ever stayed at. Recommended.

Skied a day at Monarch. Monarch’s a little ways from Colorado’s population, so it has a nice, under-visited vibe going on at it. All the lifts are old-school slow lifts (all but one’s a two-seater IIRC), but that suited me pretty well.

Yeah, so it’s the time of year where I just keep putting up lazy ski vacation blog posts.

Here’s a picture.

It snowed a few inches the night before, so the hill was very good. Some flat light, but plenty of trees to break it up. The cafeteria had three things on the menu: hamburger, hot dog, pizza. The pizza was remarkable though. On the way out, I stopped by the gift store to get my trophy mug and asked the worker there that, of Wednesday or Thursday, which should I ski? (Because I needed to work one of those two days.) She helpfully got on her computer, checked the Internet, and suggested that Thursday should be pretty (her word) “epic”.

So I went home, ate a pb&j, and then sat around the hotel all day Wednesday working on an upcoming data collection.

Wednesday night, it snowed so much that the highway up to the resort was closed all day Thursday. So: they closed the ski resort on account of snow. I watched the Colorado DOT website all day. It’s pretty amazing — you can track the movements of each of the state’s snow plows, including their speed, direction, and the area they’ve covered in the last half-hour. Uh, plus they tell you whether the highways are open (mostly they’re open, just not the one). This is what the Highway 50 camera showed for Monarch Pass:

It was sort of like a harbinger. Anyway, I therefore got to spend a bonus day hanging out at the hotel and in Salida. (I wasn’t the only one.) Pronunciation aside, Salida was a cool little town with enough real people living there to help balance out the hipsters and their cupcake shops.

Those are real ice chunks in the river btw.

Also btw, Salida is at about 7,100′ in elevation. Monarch Mountain (the ski resort) has its base at 10,780′. These are high places.

Things opened up again on Friday, so even though I was supposed to be in Frisco by Friday night, I thought I should check out Monarch again. I felt pretty bonded to the place for only ever having been there once.

This is what the drive looked like at the lower elevations. I’ve been living in Oklahoma, which is a flat place and one where compact snow and ice doesn’t happen. Anyway, 45 minutes both directions, but the resort was having a pretty good day.

I should also just mention: as inconvenient as it was to miss out on one of my planned days of skiing, as a tourist-skier, I never get this lucky. New snow? Unheard of. Ten inches of untouched powder? Never seen it before. It was pretty amazing.

And then I left, because I was supposed to be skiing again the next day at Copper and, anyway, the roads were supposed to be dodgy.

bkd

What I Did on My Winter Vacation, Part I: Arizona

Now that I’ve accepted a new job starting next summer, it’s my stated goal to minimize the amount of time I spend in Oklahoma. Sorry, Oklahoma. To that end, though, I spent most of the winter break in Other States.

First up: I’m not sure which state I should list as first. I got in my Jeep in Oklahoma at 6:00 in the morning on 12/23. It was unusually rainy. It turns out that there are no lane markings on I-40 heading west out of OKC because, I dunno, Oklahoma gonna Oklahoma. Seemed dangerous. And then the first non-Oklahoma state I hit was Texas.

It’s not a bad photo for northern Texas. Good sky. The rain had stopped. The wind was blowing about 30 mph in my face, of course, and the Jeep was eager to plumb the depths of low gas mileage on most of the trip.

Spent the night in Holbrook, Ariz., because I stayed the night in Gallup, N.M. last time I was through the area. All the hotel and restaurant employees in Holbrook were bizarrely good. I dunno. The diner where I had dinner was selling Navajo blankets for what seemed like a really good deal. Holbrook.

Also, Northern Arizona has some really pretty roads. The stretch from Holbrook most of the way down to Phoenix is pretty good.

My parents flew down to Phoenix Christmas Eve and we holed up in my brother’s place in Ahwatukee for the week.

This isn’t particularly interesting. You can skip ahead if you want.

My mom has stylish bathrobes.

Day after Christmas (I think), my brother Rick brought his family through town on the way to Utah to disgorge my nephew at the MTC as he makes his way to yet another central American jungle (it’s *his* first, just not humanity’s). I probably have a representative picture of that somewhere.

You understand this is mostly just a journal intended for my own future consumption, right?

So there’s my dad with Ammon and Jacob and mad props out to Noelle on the photo bomb. We shake hands an inordinate amount in my family. I’m jealous of Jacob’s tie.

All right, then there’s a really good airplane museum down in Tucson that I wanted my parents to come to, and they kindly acquiesced to this keen desire. It’s the Pima Air and Space Museum; most of the airplanes are outdoors where you can climb under and around them. It’s nice to go to an outdoor museum for once.

Here’s my dad with the A-4 he always wanted to fly:

The extra fuel tanks really stand out on that one.

And then my mom showed an unexpected fondness for the F7F Tigercat. Big Grumman fan.

The museum is also the jumping-off point for the AMARG, the military aircraft boneyard out there. We went, but the old guy at the bus depot told us the wrong side of the bus to sit on. You know how bus depot old guys are. Anyway, it was cool enough, but the museum actually seemed more interesting.

And then on the way back from Tucson, we took a quick loop through the Saguaro National Park (eastern part), making it officially my 39th national park visited. And when I say national park, I mean National Park, which is different from National Recreation Area, National Wildlife Refuge, National Forest, and National Battlefield. For one thing, it’s a park. Anyway: they had a lot of Saguaros.

Also a pretty good selection of ocotillos and prickly pear.

Visited Hole in the Rock right by the Phoenix Zoo. Photographic evidence:

And also a real ghost town whose name I don’t remember, but where new buildings were being erected, making me wonder how “ghost town” was being defined.

And then on New Year’s Eve I took off for Taos, because that’s just what I do.

bkd