Who said Christmas is just for kids? Not Amy and Neal. With a little supervisory help from the grandparents, and with a few hours free before starting Christmas dinner, they left Reed and Nina to play with presents and snuck out in seek of their own. It looks like Amy got what she wanted. Having just wrapped up a casual-paced morning of gifts and coffee, Christy and I headed to Highlands...
The Little Nell, yesterday. (the Little Nell, yesterday) Resembling a scene out of the early season playbook from upstate New York’s Hunter Mountain, a.k.a. “The Snowmaking Capitol of the World”, the recent low temperatures have allowed the still primitive-by-east-coast-standards snowmaking system of Aspen Mountain to crank out the fake stuff. An anonymous Aspen Ski Company insider, identified only as ‘M. Blakeslee’, confirmed that, if temperatures stay low and snowmaking continues, top-to-bottom...
Gettin’ Ready With our depature for Nepal on Wednesday, we had time for a little last minute trip prep. Our planned route on Ama Dablam is the SW Ridge. As a true hand and foot climbing route, it won’t have any significant “jug hauling”, that is, pulling ourselves up a fixed rope with mechanical ascenders, or jumars. For safety reasons though, we will be clipped in and using an ascender, while...
Sometime around mid-August we are all ready for a break from the summer season. Between the traffic and resulting people, the heat and the apex of the busy work season, the overall hectic pace of life in and around Aspen usually results in a desire to just ‘get out’ for a bit. Sometimes all that is needed is some sort of catalyst. Saturday was my birthday. And with that said, the trip up to the remote lakes bearing the name...
More specifically, Conundrum Creek trail up to Triangle Pass, down to Copper Lake, up to East Maroon Pass and down East Maroon Creek. The route can actually be completed in either direction, in our case Todd Clark, Christy and I began the day at the Conundrum Creek Trailhead (8800 ft.) and ran most of the popular trail up 8 miles or so to the famous hot springs (11,200 ft.) that bear the trails name. FYI, the lowest...
Glen on the summit. Route: East Face Team: Ted, John Morrison, Glen Poulsen All Chris Davenport said was that two of his friends, who get after it around Tahoe and the Sierras, were coming to town and looking to ski, and that they were going to call Neal and me. Oh and one more thing, they crushed him (Chris) on Mount Williamson, a 14er in California, last month. Hmm, that’s something you never...
We met in Aspen in 2000 and have been happily stuck in the rockies ever since, getting out in the mountains every day we can, in every season and by all means possible. Read More
