If you’ve stopped by this corner of the www lately, you probably noticed I’ve kind of let things go fallow for the past month or so.  To my credit, I’m not CNN.  No one is visiting this place for breaking news.  Nevertheless, apologies for the extended silence.  Just the normal holiday distractions pulling my attention to other things.  And while I’ve been out there in the Colorado mountains doing Colorado stuff, the adventures have been smaller and closer to home.  There has been very little new or different enough to warrant the bandwidth of a blog post. 

But with the holidays over, ready or not, we find ourselves in a new year.   I hope this post finds you and yours healthy and happy, doing whatever it is you love to do.  

So, without further ado, let’s get into it. 

Something I’ve been thinking about is how differently winter presents itself each year.  It’s one of the many things that makes getting outside in Colorado so motivating.  Some years winter comes in like gangbusters and we’re up in the mountains skiing in December.  Other years it seems like it takes forever for winter to start.  From a backcountry skiing perspective, the ideal winter starts out thin with a few light storms and then gradually builds fatter and fatter to a peak just before spring.  But these days it rarely happens that systematically.  Each snowfall pattern gives each particular winter its own look and feel, its own rhythm in terms of activities, its own shape if you will, as reflected in the snowpack depth.

This winter started off just after Thanksgiving with several reasonably good snowfalls.  But then the snow machine shut off and we’ve watched as the mountain snowpack gradually thinned out and the skiing turned into an exercise in dodging rocks.  That seldom ends well.

I mostly shifted from skis back to bikes.  

But this past week winter rolled in with a vengeance.  Something like three feet of snow has fallen at Monarch in the past seven days. It snowed so much that CDOT closed highway 50 over Monarch Pass not once but twice during the week to do avalanche control and clear the road.  I don’t remember that happening since I was a kid.  So while the driving has been treacherous – can I get a ski rack for a tauntaun? – the skiing has been amazing. 

It’s January and we’re finally in the fat of winter.  Monarch looks the way it should.  

Spot the skier.

Top of the Continental Divide in white-out conditions.