Surviving the Colorado Curse

Steep atop Denver International’s darkest crag lies perched, peering, seeing, watching: the cursed stallion.

 

With beady red eyes, bulging blue veins, and a nasty bite he haunts the mile high city. All who fly into Colorado’s newest, great airport are cursed. Cursed with a terrible curse.

I myself was afflicted by the apocalyptic hell beast, and it began the day prior to my arrival – a tribute to its cursiness. An innocents night sledding was ended tragically by my left knee bending in half the way nature never intended. Contributing factors may have included sledding from the top of a three hundred plus yard sledding hill, a small craft advisory, and a near complete lack of prior sledding experience; nevertheless, I was without warning catapulted from my sled and onto my left leg which promptly collapsed like papermache. I additionally somehow got a road rash on my right forearm from the experience, the stallion!

A few days later transgressions continued when I learned my four-week clinical “elective” would actually be four weeks of 12 hour days, tedious dictations, and regular floggings. I had hoped to commute to the hospital via bus or carpool with a friend, but the partial ACL tear, mild MCL sprain, mild LCL sprain, patellar-tibial contusion, and gastrocnemius strain all limited the feasibility of the former while working till the darkest dark of night limited the feasibility of the latter. Eventually I was forced to rent a car for the mere sum of a whole hell of a lot more than advertised.

Paying about 3 times more than listed for taxes, fees, and any lick of insurance coverage was actually one of the few fortuitous decisions I made, however, as within 2 days of acquiring the new car – and 5 days from my original sledding accident – a young woman decided to drive into the side of it. Her initial reaction to pulling out into traffic and hitting my front bumper consisted of “why didn’t you stop?!” as if in the US -- or anywhere on any planet for that matter -- it’s perfectly acceptable to make left hand turns in front of rapidly oncoming automobiles whenever you want. Once her boyfriend pointed out this was insanity she then fell back to exclaiming, “it’s not my fault!” endlessly until the police finally came. My reward for this? A new car and a significantly more expensive new rental car contract. Curse you cursed stallion!

I had to lay low for the next few weeks while the jinx passed, and was thankfully sheltered by my friend Adam and Kate in their basement under an alias. They thankfully are exceedingly generous hosts, Kate’s cooking exceedingly delicious, and their children exceedingly prone to hop merrily in place at the slightest provocation. Aside from some additional difficulty finding dry cleaning – I eventually had to go to Denver’s Korea Town – and a general lack of improvement in range in motion of my knee, things began to blow over. Unfortunately a final blow came the final week when an unknown assailant struck down Dara their slouchier, whiter dog. Some say it was a veterinarian putting an old, good dog down to her final resting place. Others say it was that stallion. And still others say it was the stallion posing as a veterinarian. All that’s clear is that through Dar-Dar’s sacrifice the curse was lifted. Or it just went away on its own. Curses are weird like that. The boys were saddened by the loss of their beloved pet, but after determining she had gone down into the pits of the Earth to doggy heaven and that they’d likely be getting another, younger dog in the future they decided they were ok with their other remaining pets. They eventually returned to hopping, and after working far more than I ever cared to on an elective, I flew home away from the demon's stare.

This post is dedicated to Dar-Dar. The best old, white dog I have ever known. We'll miss you girl.

 En memorum.

This photo is an approximation. I do not actually have a photo of Dara, but she looked kind of like this. But older.

Death By T-Bar

There are two types of fear a man can face in life: the fear of what he is about to do and the fear of what may happen. The former a man must work himself to enter into, the latter a man must work himself to escape from. But sometimes, in some situations, there is no predicting the future and there is no escape.

And so I found myself being dragged uphill by a small piece of plastic tucked behind my legs, tethered to a cable by a thin piece of bungee, not knowing if I would live or die. It turns out Rachel and I would survive, but only after one crash which thankfully spared the pair being dragged precariously uphill behind us. The "t-bar," as this ridiculous means of transportation is known, is supposed to bring you from the bottom of the slope to the top via a simple hook and pull mechanism whereby you hook a bar of plastic behind your legs and let it pull you forward praying in its stability. Most of the time it works, some of the time it does not, and all of the time you are given no warning as to whether or when the bar will gave way and you will be dispatched out onto the snow and into the path of other slowly dragging t-barers. The particularly unlucky are then honored with becoming human speed bumps which then result in the additional demise of those immediately behind them and so on and so forth until the dog pile of skiers and snowboarders manages to clear itself from the path or the whole pile reaches critical mass triggering an avalanche of snow and tangled bodies. Of course the best fails are the epic fails where a new skier first attempts the t-bar by sitting on the plastic wedge, something it is entirely not designed for, and so splays himself out onto the snow only 10 feet from the bottom station and lines of onlookers. I hate the t-bar, it is crap.

T-bar related anxieties aside, our most recent trip to Breckenridge, Colorado, was nice, and, as all trips with the Gravels are now required to be, full of Yorkies. We met up with some friends Adam and Kate, threw their kids down some hills on some sleds, had some crepes, and called it a week. I finally graduated to the bowls, and the one day we went was of course the one day with no visibility. The sky was white, the ground was white, the snow was white. I didn't know where I was or where I was going. We nevertheless jumped in and after a series of falls and a series of prolonged slides it turned out I was at the bottom. The trick, I found, is believing in yourself. And going very, very slowly.

There were also no casualties this time. No butt lacerations or face planting snow shoe misadventures. I did, however, lose my wallet on the very first day to my old nemesis, Frosty's Freeway. One spill and it was gone. I then got to spend the rest of the trip living on food stamps and Paul and Rachel's generosity. I will have my revenge, though, oh yes, I will have my revenge. I just need to figure out how.

Anyways, here's what snow looks like.

All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

I have generally always felt that skiing and snowboarding were luxury items reserved for the landed elites when not otherwise engaging in polo, yachting, or a good fox hunt. Undoubtedly fun, but also undoubtedly expensive, and, as such, hard to defend in an already resource lopsided world. This was all before I smoked the crack pipe of winter mountain adventure, however, and now that I have I can more easily embrace self-indulgence. Skiing, it turns out, is not just fun, but very fun. Perhaps addictively so. I have and continue to rationalize my participation in such activities with the fact that costs have always been significantly reduced by free housing complements of Paul's family, but who am I kidding? I'm rich and I may as well not pretend otherwise.

The socioeconomics of skiing aside, my third and latest skiing trip the week before Christmas was notable for my final surmounting of the black diamond barrier. Last year I barely made it through blue-blacks -- bouncing my way down Frosty's Freeway on my back -- but this year I deftly descended a groomed black -- Cinarron was it? Cinnamon? -- with no problems. In my controlled chaos way of skiing at least. We also did two double blacks which sent me tumbling, but even when the tumble lasted the better part of a minute and involved several somersaults and an extended slide on my back it was a better experience than the accursed Frosty's Freeway. All my bravado aside, I cannot say I have ever felt a compelling need to constantly push myself to the limit with skiing, and so it was nice to ski joust and generally fool around on some greens and blues as well.

There was of course more to our trip than just skiing; we snowshoed as well! After paying heavy fees and acquiring the tacit approval of the mildly disgruntled majority we donned some shoes, Megan donned her ear flap cap, and we were off to see the waterfall. The waterfall never really materialized thanks to a thick blanket of snow, and Liz and Rachel had to turn back for sugar related issues -- it would seem Liz is a very stoic hypoglycemic --, and my snowman was a complete failure, but overall in the measure of most snowshoeing trips I'd say the trip was a success. Everyone had a good sweat at the very least.

And finally there was also much card playing. Specifically, the playing of Nertz. Normally card playing doesn't make for a very exciting subject to write about, but it is in this case because Drew and I were an unstoppable Nertz playing forced to be reckoned with. I imagine this was due more to Drew's prowess than my own, but I will nevertheless take equal credit for it. We rock. Undefeated. Booyah.

We also played some seemingly fabricated game involving player-selected famous persons -- or in our case mostly cartoon characters it seemed -- but as no one knew who El Cid was I don't want to talk about it. One fact I learned from the game, however, is that in some circles Xena: Warrior Princess was a show about lesbians. You decide!

Finally, finally, what truly set this ski trip apart from all the others -- aside from the lack of any in car brawls -- was our trip through northeastern New Mexico. More specifically it was the fact that we, or rather I, ran out of gas and our minivan puttered to a stop in the middle of nowhere just outside of Las Vegas, NM. In my defense I don't believe we passed a single gas station in the preceding hours before our unscheduled stop, but regardless an extra hour was added on to our trip in the acquisition of more fuel. We tried to get help from the local trailer home folk, but aside from a brief chat with a friendly Australian Sheepdog no help was to be found. This was probably for the best, however, as according to a cop Drew and Angie got a ride with the locals would have sooner sold us to coyotes than have sold us a gallon of gas. Oh wells, what're you gonna do?

My Photos

Rachel and Paul's Photos

Rocky Mountain Majesty

It’s almost a week since I’ve returned from saving Mother Earth and I still feel that she wasn’t worth saving. In many ways I enjoyed the trip – the Sangre de Cristos are a beautiful mountain range and I loved being outside – but the overwhelming feeling is a feeling of futility. The majority of the time was spent working and the majority of the work seemed inefficient or ineffective. Whether it was laboring to slowly build up a trail so that, after some 200 cumulative man hours, it looked slightly more like a trail rather than a scrambled jumble of rocks or it was digging up parts of the hill side to fill in holes in other parts of the hillside it just seemed like we were fighting a losing battle. People were still hiking off trail. Many of the transplants likely died. I still don’t have any idea why we moved half of the rocks we did. The alpine environment was simply too fragile and mankind is simply too determined to enjoy it for our work to have any lasting significance I feel. Plus, especially in pertaining to our reconstruction efforts, it seems like we just despoiled one area of land in a desperate attempt to reclaim another previously despoiled area of land. Oh wells, let us not lament such things. They don’t make for very good stories. Marmots, on the other hand, make for great protagonists.

Marmots, for those not in the know, are essentially big, friendly mountain beavers that make sounds eerily similar to the sounds of an electronic pager. Their significantly smaller and more skittish friends the pica make noises exactly like electronic pagers. I am fairly confident they use this chorus of sound to coordinate their raids on our camp as they came to visit whenever they had the chance. Our leaders said it was because they’d eat anything and everything if given the opportunity, but I like to think they were just saying hello – saying hello by eating our stuff and licking up our urine that is. They never touched my gear, though, and for that I am grateful. I’d say I have a Planeteer like ability to bond with animals, but we all know no one liked Ma-Ti.

Marmots aside, the rest of the trip was for the most part enjoyable. Certainly met some interesting people and interesting personalities. From amicable old, nuclear plant workers who called me “doc;” to young, naïve Anglican-Tibetan Buddhists who could not stop talking; to extroverted, amateur snowboarding occupational therapists; and to a variety of people of all ages a little too in touch with nature and perhaps not in touch enough with the rest of the world it was an eclectic group. I am now also familiar with the term “cougar” as well so all the kids will respect my street kred once again. And I am now familiar with what congestive heart failure must feel like as physical exertion at 12,000 feet is essentially the shortest path to shortness of breath. There were mornings when I woke up and loathed getting out of bed, but, to be corny, I never regretted doing so.

I cannot let the account end here, however, as there was certainly much more to be experienced.

The Wag system, for example, was a unique treat. Although defecating in a glorified bucket was easy to get accustomed to, pooping out in the open with a frozen mountain wind blowing through your shorts was not. I never had to clean the Wag, but I can easily say I will not miss it.

The hike atop Crestone Peak was a joy and considerably easier than I was expecting. I may not be able to carry a pack worthy my salt, but I can certainly climb like a monkey when necessary. To be able to see the Great Sand Dunes National Park from atop a mountain was also an amazing opportunity.

And finally, jumping into an alpine lake was an experience I will never forget and hopefully never repeat. I had never felt uncontrolled reactive physiology before, but after jumping into that lake there was little I could do to stop myself from breathing 30 times a minute. My first and only instinct was to gasp for air as frequently and as strongly as I could. That and scream. Interestingly enough, however, the experience of getting out of the water was remarkably enjoyable and satisfying. Despite the air around the lake being relatively chilly itself as well, removing myself from the pool was profoundly calming and warming. With just a shirt and some pants on I felt great. Relaxed and rejuvenated even. My heart may have been a little worse for wear, but there’s a satisfying feeling that comes after experiencing nature’s stress test. I had absolutely no desire to jump in again at that moment, but one of the best moments was walking back to camp, damp from the lake, and headed to some hot chocolate and a couple dozen rounds of Speed.

My pictures....
Ben's pictures....
Jay's pictures....