Swinging a heavy bat

The Elk Mountain Grand Traverse is a week away, midnight. I am as ready as I'll ever be and I'm pretty excited for this event. It will certainly be one of the more epic adventures of my life and I'm just hoping me and the Redbeck finish in one piece mentally and physically.

In preparation for this backcountry ski race, the Redneck and I headed to Aspen last weekend to learn the route on the last part of the course - Taylor Pass to Aspen Ski Mountain. We thought this would be the best part to learn as we'll be the most tired at this point (about 15 miles from the finish at Taylor Pass) and having done it before will reduce our chances of error (getting lost). There are many "exit-stage-lefts" on this part of the course as it follows a narrowish ridge line (Richmond Hill) and roads dive off left and right frequently. Making a mistake on the course here could result in the end of your race if not worse.

We took Clifford the Big Red Truck as it was supposed to snow (but it doesn't snow in March in Colorado anymore) to Aspen Friday morning. We were headed to a dude's house that we didn't know - he was the ex-boyfriend of an ex-coworker of the Redneck's...pretty far removed but it's all we had to choose from. We didn't even know his real name, she just called him "Greeny". I am pretty sure it's because he smoked so much pot. I mean DAMN!! I've never seen anyone smoke this much pot, even in my high school days. This dude had a very high tolerance. The wake and bake started at 7am and went for an hour or so and then he's go ski, go to work, and then come home and smoke some more bong hits, and then watch lots of TV while pulling a few more rips, walk the dogs, then go to bed and start over. It was incredible to watch this guy pull down the bong hits one after another like it was regular oxygen in there! He was a caretaker of one of those huge mansions you see around Aspen. An insane house living next door to people that don't live there for more than a week a year...people you'd know from just their names. The Redneck and I decided we'd start bugging Lance (Armstrong) about being the caretaker of his new Aspen house.

So onto the skiing. Saturday morning we got shuttled up to Ashcroft where we were going to ski up Express Creek to Taylor Pass and then take a left on the Richmond Hill road and finish at Aspen Mountain Resort some 15 or so miles later. Stupid as i am, I brought the GPS but neglected to calculate out how many miles it was from Ashcroft to Aspen going this route. The locals told us it was anywhere from 10 - 30 miles depending on who you asked. People are definitely prone to exaggeration. Luckily at Ute Mountaineering, we met up with Elliot, who we strangely both knew from racing in Boulder nearly 10 years back. (At most three degrees of separation in Boulder I tell you.) He had done the GT 5 times and gave us all the inside beta - best maps displaying the route with mileage, and super secret geeky light stuff to use for the race.

"What stove are you bringing?" he asked.
I replied that we were bringing a Jetboil (a superlight camping stove if you haven't heard of it.) "NO NO NO...check this out."

And that's how it went for several of the items we planned on putting in our packs. We ended up with a new "stove," if you can actually call it that. It's basically a piece of aluminum that folds open like a clamshell, burns fuel blocks in the open area below where you set the pot. It's weightless compared to the Jetboil. Such it is with this race - you don't want to carry any more weight than you have to for the 40 miles.

Ashcroft in the early AM

Training for this race has been the most unique and fun training I've done since I was "training" for Montezuma's Revenge - a 24 hour bike race that is no longer, sadly. (If you haven't heard of this race, Google it, it is truly insane and beat me to a bloody pulp the two years I did it.) But like any such race, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Cliche' as it may be, it's true. And although you may hate these endurance events sometimes while you are racing, there's truly no experience like it, and there's not many things mentally harder than keeping yourself going. Overcoming the want to quit is incredibly difficult sometimes. But when you do keep going, the satisfaction of finishing - just FINISHING - these events is overwhelming. When training means days like these where you spend as long as you can out in the woods on skis, exploring as many places as you can....I can dig it.


I've been swinging a heavy bat to train for this event. Like riding with heavy training wheels or a heavy pack to make yourself stronger on the bike...skiing with heavy skis and a heavy pack will eventually make you stronger. Along with spending many hours each weekend day on the tele and AT gear in the backcountry, during the week I've been skate- and classic-skiing on the Asnes Holmenkollens, a 3/4 edge black as night Norwegian skis that only Neptune Mountaineering carries (literally, the only shop in the entire US). They are light, but definitely not made to skate or classic in tracks necessarily. But they're so cool cause they CAN do it, and do it all pretty good. They also have this inexplicable 'spirit' from the old country that makes them just cool. These are our guides on the Grand Traverse.

One thing they can't do so well, however, is go downhill in variable conditions. Here's the Redneck headed down a slight descent on windblown crust...sketchy to say the least!

The route was much easier to find than we expected. My GPS background map actually showed Richmond Hill road on it...so navigating wasn't too hard. Also, the snowmobile tracks (see above pic on the left) followed the route pretty closely, although there were frequent offshoots. The temperature got up to almost 50 degrees (at over 12,000ft) though so our choice of kick wax became an issue. We must have put on/taken off our kicker skins 4 times as the ridge line tilted up and then down the entire way back to Aspen. The snowmobile track also make using kick wax harder than normal because of inconsistent and broken up snow and the "whoops" they create on the trail from accelerating. The whoops were just the right length where our skis would mostly make contact on the tips and tails leaving the wax pocket in mid-air and therefore no grip to push forward. This became even more interesting on the downhills when our skis compressed and the wax pocket hit the ground nearly stoping us on every other whoop! Needless to say, I went over the bars a few times.

After about 5 hours at around 2 or 3pm, we reached the top of Aspen Mountain and skied into a different world. Aspen is its own bubble - Boulder times 10. Imagine us with huge packs, skinny-ass skis and long poles kicking and gliding past the Sundeck at the top of Aspen. Aged "Information Officer" skiers watched as they talked to sking newbies and passed out ski maps; a woman ski patroller threw a ball for the avalanche dog in the middle of the passing skiers; fur lined-coats lined rich skiers in all directions who had all paid $97 to ski there for one day here. The reality of it all was in such funny contrast to our mindset at the time. Even funnier was that we were going to go down Aspen Mountain on these skis. This is something to witness, and practice especially before race day when you're 37 miles into it and still have to ski down 3,000ft vertical to the finish! With a mixture of old-school skinny-ski telemark turns and hip-chucking alpine turns, we threaded through the other skiers on the mountain getting some pretty funny looks and comments along the way. We were just happy not to run into any ski patrollers as we didn't have lift tickets or leashes for our skis...both a hefty fine I imagine. But I wondered if the trespassing and leash fine would be more than a lift ticket? Doubt it.

All said and done it took us about 6 hours at a relatively mellow pace. At the bottom of the mountain, we de-skied and hopped on the local free bus back to the mansion where we met up with Greeny who was again hitting the bong after a good day of skiing.

"How was the route-finding mission boys?" he asked.

"Great! No problem in finding the route at all!" I said.

In his thick Jersey accent, "Yeah, you'd have to be fuckin retaaahdid to get lost on that part of the trail!"

Indeed we would...but I've been known to be fuckin retaaahdid before...!
A full report when we get back.