Moving...

Yes, we've bought a new place, a "ranch" of a relatively smaller sort to be exact, about 3 miles away from our current house. We are psyched! So in the next 3 weeks, we'll be packing everything up and GOing with the 6 dogs...and we have two rescued, very cute, horses who will be joining us there in June.

As always, moving is a huge event, so before putting my head down and getting moving, I thought I'd sneak out for a ski with the Pilot as we got 8" of new snow up high and it was going to be a bluebird day in IP.

Here's the Pilot at the first "top" of the run. See the fog way down low? Boulder was socked in with dense fog, up high it was 15deg and sunny...perfect for some ridge turns! Nobody is ever up here and it's always safe after storms as it's not that steep.

This time of year the south facing slopes get weird, hard from getting sun-baked and then the new snow on top slides really well on that sun crust. In this area we hug the skiers-right trees every run for that reason, and because that's where the snow piles up! This is USUALLY the windiest place in the county, but today it was amazingly still.

This is "Benji's Trough" named for the skier in the picture. The Pilot and i were de-skinning about to take a run on this untracked slice of paradise...and then suddenly heard voices. Being all alone up there and seeing no tracks from where we came from, we did a double-take...HUH?! Then two guys skied down from above us on the ridge seemingly out of nowhere! They were headed for the same gully in the picture. After some casual conversation they asked if they might take the first turns in the trough. Seeing as we just tracked up another run, we gracefully obliged - especially after hearing that Benji and his friend had (1) skied from his stepfathers house down on the main road, (2) had skied this exact spot 30 years earlier on wood skis as a kid, and (3) had to get home to brunch at the house. That was pretty cool...and we thought WE were locals.

After another run following those dudes, we headed for the other bowl, the big bowl around the windswept krumholtz ridge from the Peanut Bowl. We followed Benji's tracks over there and then the wind picked up, of course, giving near frostbite to our right sides of our faces. Once there, the snow was a bit deeper and the run is quite a bit longer if less steep...and just amazing. For me, it was the perfect run, that last run of the day. Hitting the trail we come in on, we had 2 options - go left back to the trailhead which would be a 4 mile mostly rolling XC trail, OR head down the creek where neither of us had ever been before and come out on the main road and risk the hitch back to the truck. Hmm...yep, we chose the latter.

Needless to say it was sweet. Here's the Pilot hiking out from the creek to the road where we sat for 40 minutes waiting for a ride. Finally, a dad from AZ with his two his kids from CU stopped and picked us up (and our gear!) in their rental SUV. Safely back at the truck 10 minutes later, i got that grin that only this type of day can produce. The type of day where it could've been a real standard route, predictable almost, but thankfully we chose a couple of options that made for a mini-adventure. We linked two spots that we usually do independently, and then explored the lower reaches of the creek instead of the known XC trail. I was even home by 2 to start moving!

Hope everyone has a good week. I'm heading to the Bay Area to help my Mom around the house who fractured a vertebrae recently, and then I'm heading to the Clark Peak Yurt with some Pilots next Sunday for a few days. Cheers!