[Christy here]

With pretty incredible spring snow conditions continuing in Colorado, it has actually been hard to wrap up the skiing. However, this past weekend we finally started to transition into summer, splitting our weekend 50 – 50 between running and the Centennials project.

For the past three years, on the first Saturday in June, we’ve participated in the Dirty 30 running race in Golden Gate State Park.  Different from the park in San Francisco, this is a beautiful state park (which many people don’t know about) just a few miles from Colorado’s gambling towns of Blackhawk and Central City.

The 50km course has approximately 8,000 feet of climbing and descending, and does a big loop through pine forests, aspen groves, grassy meadows, and rocky ridges, all with grand views of the Continental Divide. It’s always a fun time and the perfect way to get in a 30+ mile run before the San Juan Solstice 50 later in June.

On our way down, we stopped in Frisco to pick up good friend and Ted’s “Global Extremes” teammate, Colleen Inkhen, who not only would join us for the race on Saturday, but was also up for skiing a 13er on Sunday! We had packed our ski stuff just in case we felt up for skiing Mount Silverheels, just outside of Alma. Colleen and her family had lived for years in Alma, at 11,100 ft., before moving down to Frisco, so she was psyched to get back there.

Silverheels can be a mean place, being notoriously windy. We have been blown off its summit before, most recently a couple months ago. But its one of Colorado’s Centennial Peaks so we figured might as well get it while there’s a great deal of sunshine, warm temps, and great corn skiing. We were pleasantly surprised with the ski down, and enjoyed the short round trip mileage (~5 miles), which made for the perfect day of “active recovery”. Our report was so good that our ski the 13ers partner, Chris Davenport, headed over  two days after to get it done himself, and we all checked another 13er off our list.

There might be one more weekend of skiing to nab a couple 13ers I missed this spring before wrapping up the season for good. But after that, it’s on to summer. Even though it always seems to work out fine, we’re feeling a little bit behind/over committed for some upcoming races. We’ll see.