My Wild Ski Trip

Me and Ouray, CO
Originally uploaded by SethTri

First, as many have heard already, during this ski trip I proposed to Meg. Meg's working on putting together a post describing how. I'm usually leaving it to her to do it because she's so excited. Why not me? Well, I kinda saw it coming, so while I'm still thrilled that she said yes, I never had any doubt that she would. My tone is a little less "OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD!" than hers. So, she's a little more fun to listen to tell the story.

Back to our regularly scheduled blog entry... (not really so regular, sorry about that.)

Meg & I went our separate paths on this trip. I left a day earlier than she did and very different routes. My first endpoint (by plane) was Chicago, where I jumped into a (more expensive than anticipated) cab ride to the train station. After a 3 hr wait due to the train being a little frozen over in spots apparently, we got on the 4 hr ride to Jackson where my ever so patient family were waiting for me. Got to my Aunt's house and passed out.

We spent the entire next day talking and catching up. Had some good food and I told the family the game plan for the trip. Then, after dinner, we all piled back into the car and headed to the train station so I could be back in a hotel in Chicago a little after midnight. Pass out there, back in the airport by 7 for my 9:00 departure to Salt Lake City (SLC), Utah.

Pull into SLC where my friend Stephen is waiting for me. We grab lunch at an Italian Deli, check out the Black Diamond shop and meander our way down to Park City, UT where we found a room in a hostel with 2 beds for relatively cheap.

Why only relatively cheap? 'cause for those of us who don't pay attention to Hollywood much, apparently during the last couple weeks of January, there's this little thing going on in Park City called Sundance. Hotels are packed and expensive, parking is insane, but no one is on the mountain because they're all watching movies.

On Wednesday night we did manage to snag a movie. A kinda funny French flick, but we both were struggling to stay conscious for the last 30 minutes. Thursday we hooked up with a ski patrol buddy of Stephen's who got us discount lift tickets to The Canyons and took us into the backcountry. So glad we got the discount tix, because full price for only 3 rides seems insane. Seth's a pretty cool guy who relocated himself from Maine to do the fun stuff in Utah. In a lot of ways I'm jealous. But his work schedule is pretty insane and I don't have the guts to just drop everything and live the lifestyle. (That and
Meg would probably kill me now.)

Thursday night our buddy Joe showed up. Friday the three of us went to Park City (only 150yds away from the hotel!). We skied pretty hard and threw Stephen down some pretty gnarly stuff. He's a trooper though and managed to get down most of it without serious problems. Joe took a pretty good digger that kind whacked his noggin' a bit while trying to mess with Stephen, but that's about as bad as it got.


Apres ski found us hanging out with 6 - 8 former Tampa Bay Cheerleaders. (Some of them clearly VERY former, if you catch my drfit.) But we all kinda laughed about it and Stephen met a ski instructor for a lesson, so it was good. We had dinner, found Joe's knee had swollen to the size of a grapefruit (but no pain) and passed out.

Saturday, Stephen went to a lesson, while Joe & I warmed up on black diamonds. Joe's knee wasn't bothering him, but was still pretty swollen. My head wasn't in the game (jet lag + a few days of hard skiing taking their toll) and I took a doozy of a tumbler. (2 cartwheels followed by 2 somersaults, and a loss of about 40+ feet of vertical.) That woke me up and we really started hitting it again. Joe's knee made him bail by noon and Stephen and I had a good time reinforcing his lesson while I worked on comfort with speed and being fluid. Another awesome day.



Sunday, we bid farewell to Joe at the airport while Stephen and I headed to Ouray, Colorado with the goal of ice climbing on Monday. A major weather system started to hit us though, and when we woke up on Monday morning, 3 passes were closed between us and our final destination (Durango) with a forecast of a long delayed opening, so rather than climb, we drove. What should have been a 1.5-2 hr drive took us 5-6 hrs and 200 miles to get around the 4 closed mountain passes. But we got to Durango, met up with friends and hot tubbed. It was good.

The weather system continued to pound the region and we went skiing on Tuesday, got a bit of ice climbing in on Wednesday, more skiing on Thursday and Friday. (Engaged on Thursday too on the mountain.) We moved into town on Friday where Durango's snowdown was going on. Snowshoing on Saturday morning, Follies (skits) on Saturday night, followed by Superbowl on Sunday. (Not very often I can watch a Spartan catch the winning touch down in a superbowl!)

Monday most of us were planning on leaving. Some had planned on the 6am flight 'cause they had to work on Tuesday and wanted to get to DC at a reasonable hour. We chose the 1pm 'cause we weren't in a hurry. Unfortunately, it had snowed 18" overnight (making that a total of 65" over the course of a week!), and the 1pm was the first flight that wasn't canceled. We got back to DC where my parents were waiting for us and drove us into Arlington.


Dentist, shopping, hang out with my folks, hang out with some friends that couldn't make it into Durango and the next thing you know we're back on a plane to Tbilisi. We did a lot, skied a lot, talked to a lot of people and had a blast. One thing we didn't do: sleep a lot. Wow, I think we're still trying to catch up on that.

Thanks to all for helping make it as great of a vacation as it was. Craig: sorry you couldn't make it this year. It was epic again. How does next year sound?