It’s July 16th, a.k.a. the most important day of the year, and if you haven’t seen Christy and her long red dress and wished her a happy birthday yet, you can still acknowledge the significance of the day at the Aspen Club tennis courts until 8, then at the Sky until about 10 and finally at the Belly Up for the ‘Jes Grew’ reunion show until midnight(w/ cake, thanks Troy)....
One of the best things about having some big goals on the horizon is getting prepared. Friday evening we went up to Turkey Rock for an easy two pitches of rock climbing. The next morning, we headed over the pass towards Twin Lakes to Monitor Rock where we had a climb of the ‘Trooper Traverse’ planned. At 5 pitches in length and with a crux difficulty rating of 5.8 it was...
The Hardrock 100 starts at 6 am friday and though my feet are glad to miss this one, I must admit feeling a bit bummed that I won’t be there. The results of the February lottery had me at 40th on the waitlist behind 140 accepted runners, and I thought it to be a long shot that some 30% of the accepted field would drop. I was wrong. Yesterday I moved up to 2nd on the...
Skiing the Conundrum Couloir on the 4th!
At 13,988 ft., Grizzly Peak is the tallest 13er in the state and a regular on many ski mountaineers spring tick list. Dirk and I found it in pretty good shape last Thursday. [singlepic=13,361,500,,center] Technically, Grizzly falls in the Sawatch Range and not in the Elks but with popular access beginning a short way up Independence Pass on the Aspen side, it feels pretty local. If you put together a list...
So it was a record breaking ski season and snow year in most of Colorado. That’s good, right? Well it was way back in January that Christy, Richard Betts and I made plans to run this race. The mountainous course touches 13,300 ft., has more than 12,000 feet of elevation gain and spends the majority of miles well above 10K(with a huge stretch above 12K). Last June Christy had ideal conditions and a...
Route: Southeast Face Partners: Christy, Dirk Bockelmann Saturday’s ski of North Maroon was super-smooth. Maybe we should go for South Maroon too? We all felt some momentum from the day so by the time we left the tailgate at Maroon Lake after North, Christy and Dirk were up for coming along on South tomorrow. With a favorable report from the 9+ people who skied its slopes on Saturday we figured all we needed was to rally some tired legs. We...
Memorial Day Weekend – The Official Summer Kickoff Someone needs to let Snowmass Lake know it’s Memorial Day weekend and not midwinter. It’s still totally frozen up there. Christy, Josh Hirshberg and I headed that way last Saturday for a few days. Getting up the 8 mile trail is adventure enough for most. We had two peaks to ski– Snowmass Mountain and Hagerman Peak. Christy was happy that what in...
A spring climb and ski descent in 2008 of Hagerman Peak, near Snowmass Mountain and Snowmass Lake. We don’t hear much about Hagerman Peak. Even being one of the tallest (top-ten) local peaks in the Aspen area, it seems to garner little attention.
An epic Type II fun day on a remote 13er in the San Juans. There were definitely some lesson learned.