Days 6 & 7: We just got back from a road trip to the 36 Hours of Keystone.
FTO was invited to field a team for this sufferfest that requires each team to ski one run per hour for 36 straight hours, from 9 am Friday morning to 9 pm Saturday night. Skidog and The Kid were in, and we set out at 10 am Thursday morning for the 7-hour drive through a whole lotta nuttin' to Keystone. Anyone who thinks there's no open space left in this country should take a drive from SLC to Grand Junction.
Terrain on Friday was more or less limited to two basic routes down the frontside, aka Dercum Mountain: Spring Dipper, and Schoolmarm. A third route down Flying Dutchman opened by Friday evening. Crowding was much more dense than anything I've encountered in years -- honestly, it was a zoo that only got worse as day turned to night on Friday, although locals advised that this wasn't terribly crowded, relatively speaking. I frankly spent as much time watching my back as I did the terrain in front of me.
The day started cloudy, but snowfall arrived in bands as the day progressed. We had high hopes for a storm moving in from the southwest, but the system really never seemed to get its stuff together -- one minute it would be snowing to beat the band, and the next the sun would be breaking through. All the while via the Internet we watched impressive radar echoes sitting over the Wasatch Mountains at home. Mrs. Admin was supposed to drive over Friday afternoon with our team's fourth member, but her late start and the storm's early onset in Utah convinced her to turn around and go home, rather than risk an ugly drive at night through truly desolate country.
Now, other teams were smart about it -- they organized a schedule in advance to ski in four-hour shifts. And most of them had four team members. The three of us, on the other hand, weren't quite so smart. Skidog and I wanted to ski together and The Kid wanted to hit up the park. So it turned out that Skidog and I logged the one-per-hour runs together from 9 am to 11 pm while The Kid slept for perhaps two hours total between park runs. The plan was for him to take over from 11 pm to 6 am.
The worst part, perhaps, was the waiting around between runs. We eventually caught on to taking one run at 5 minutes before the hour or so, and following that immediately with a second run at about 10 minutes past the hour, leaving a good 90 minutes to chill between groups of two runs. We fortunately got to chat with lots of cool folks also waiting out the time between runs. One guy, 49, was shooting for 100 runs by skiing 3 runs each hour for the duration of the event. Others had more modest, yet lofty goals of skiing all 36 hours themselves. Even by following our one-run-per-hour plan we'd logged nearly 30,000 verts by the time The Kid took over at 11 pm.
Through the evening, though, things just got crazier. They started pat-downs to access the ski hill, creating a 30-minute line at the pedestrian bridge across the Snake River. The concurrent music festival filled the Village with crowds shoulder-to-shoulder. The ski runs got more crowded, and skiers and riders were increasingly out of control. I've never before seen a 90%+ snowboarder population, but this was it.
Skidog and I grabbed a beer and a bottle of ibuprofen before crashing, finding it hard to sleep with the drunk crazies outside despite our exhaustion. At 1:15 am my cell phone rang. It was The Kid, stuck at the top of the hill with a binding toepiece that had pulled out of his ski. He skied down on one ski and showed up at the condo to grab my skis. We hurriedly set about adjusting my bindings to fit his boots, rushing against the clock to get him back out before the 1 am hour expired. It was going to be close. After 13 straight hours on the hill, neither Skidog nor I were in any shape to relieve him. As we're fitting my skis to his boots he leaned forward. "It's getting nuts out there," he said. "Do I really have to go back out?"
I knew what it was like out there two and a half hours earlier, and imagined what it must have been like at that point. I paused for a moment before replying, "No. Go get some sleep."
We thus threw in the towel.
It was noon Saturday by the time we boarded a lift again, and our legs were Jello -- I think we skied only 4 or 5 more runs on Saturday. Snowfall continued at varying intensities throughout the day but never seemed to add up to more than a few inches. We were supposed to meet up with TeamSummit, but she escaped to Denver after only a run or two, finding things way too crowded for her liking. At 8:30 pm with our tails between our legs we turned in our sorry punch card and trivia answers, and wandered over to the seafood restaurant at The Inn at Keystone, where we had a picture-perfect view of the fireworks commemorating the close of the event as we enjoyed an above-average dinner.
Mapadu was just getting off work at the pizza joint, so we joined him for a beer at The Goat before retiring. This morning, we checked out of the condo and slid up the unplowed road to the tiny town of Montezuma, population ~60, to join him at Chez Mapadu, aka the "Tiltin' Hilton" for a morning coffee. He and his roommate Paul went skinning out their front door up Tiptop Peak for a few runs while we drove back to Salt Lake. We stopped en route at the Canyon Wind Winery near Grand Junction for a tasting and a couple of bottles to bring home before winding up back home by 7 pm.
I took few photos, but here are the best of them:
FTO was invited to field a team for this sufferfest that requires each team to ski one run per hour for 36 straight hours, from 9 am Friday morning to 9 pm Saturday night. Skidog and The Kid were in, and we set out at 10 am Thursday morning for the 7-hour drive through a whole lotta nuttin' to Keystone. Anyone who thinks there's no open space left in this country should take a drive from SLC to Grand Junction.
Terrain on Friday was more or less limited to two basic routes down the frontside, aka Dercum Mountain: Spring Dipper, and Schoolmarm. A third route down Flying Dutchman opened by Friday evening. Crowding was much more dense than anything I've encountered in years -- honestly, it was a zoo that only got worse as day turned to night on Friday, although locals advised that this wasn't terribly crowded, relatively speaking. I frankly spent as much time watching my back as I did the terrain in front of me.
The day started cloudy, but snowfall arrived in bands as the day progressed. We had high hopes for a storm moving in from the southwest, but the system really never seemed to get its stuff together -- one minute it would be snowing to beat the band, and the next the sun would be breaking through. All the while via the Internet we watched impressive radar echoes sitting over the Wasatch Mountains at home. Mrs. Admin was supposed to drive over Friday afternoon with our team's fourth member, but her late start and the storm's early onset in Utah convinced her to turn around and go home, rather than risk an ugly drive at night through truly desolate country.
Now, other teams were smart about it -- they organized a schedule in advance to ski in four-hour shifts. And most of them had four team members. The three of us, on the other hand, weren't quite so smart. Skidog and I wanted to ski together and The Kid wanted to hit up the park. So it turned out that Skidog and I logged the one-per-hour runs together from 9 am to 11 pm while The Kid slept for perhaps two hours total between park runs. The plan was for him to take over from 11 pm to 6 am.
The worst part, perhaps, was the waiting around between runs. We eventually caught on to taking one run at 5 minutes before the hour or so, and following that immediately with a second run at about 10 minutes past the hour, leaving a good 90 minutes to chill between groups of two runs. We fortunately got to chat with lots of cool folks also waiting out the time between runs. One guy, 49, was shooting for 100 runs by skiing 3 runs each hour for the duration of the event. Others had more modest, yet lofty goals of skiing all 36 hours themselves. Even by following our one-run-per-hour plan we'd logged nearly 30,000 verts by the time The Kid took over at 11 pm.
Through the evening, though, things just got crazier. They started pat-downs to access the ski hill, creating a 30-minute line at the pedestrian bridge across the Snake River. The concurrent music festival filled the Village with crowds shoulder-to-shoulder. The ski runs got more crowded, and skiers and riders were increasingly out of control. I've never before seen a 90%+ snowboarder population, but this was it.
Skidog and I grabbed a beer and a bottle of ibuprofen before crashing, finding it hard to sleep with the drunk crazies outside despite our exhaustion. At 1:15 am my cell phone rang. It was The Kid, stuck at the top of the hill with a binding toepiece that had pulled out of his ski. He skied down on one ski and showed up at the condo to grab my skis. We hurriedly set about adjusting my bindings to fit his boots, rushing against the clock to get him back out before the 1 am hour expired. It was going to be close. After 13 straight hours on the hill, neither Skidog nor I were in any shape to relieve him. As we're fitting my skis to his boots he leaned forward. "It's getting nuts out there," he said. "Do I really have to go back out?"
I knew what it was like out there two and a half hours earlier, and imagined what it must have been like at that point. I paused for a moment before replying, "No. Go get some sleep."
We thus threw in the towel.
It was noon Saturday by the time we boarded a lift again, and our legs were Jello -- I think we skied only 4 or 5 more runs on Saturday. Snowfall continued at varying intensities throughout the day but never seemed to add up to more than a few inches. We were supposed to meet up with TeamSummit, but she escaped to Denver after only a run or two, finding things way too crowded for her liking. At 8:30 pm with our tails between our legs we turned in our sorry punch card and trivia answers, and wandered over to the seafood restaurant at The Inn at Keystone, where we had a picture-perfect view of the fireworks commemorating the close of the event as we enjoyed an above-average dinner.
Mapadu was just getting off work at the pizza joint, so we joined him for a beer at The Goat before retiring. This morning, we checked out of the condo and slid up the unplowed road to the tiny town of Montezuma, population ~60, to join him at Chez Mapadu, aka the "Tiltin' Hilton" for a morning coffee. He and his roommate Paul went skinning out their front door up Tiptop Peak for a few runs while we drove back to Salt Lake. We stopped en route at the Canyon Wind Winery near Grand Junction for a tasting and a couple of bottles to bring home before winding up back home by 7 pm.
I took few photos, but here are the best of them:
