The last thing I need to mention to anyone that is living along the front range right now is how much rain we have seen throughout the latter part of spring and now through mid-July. It has been straight-up crazy.
While the rain has caused some problems with doing certain outdoor activities, there still has been some time to get out and enjoy the summer (and let me clarify, it is not the rain that is the issue, it is the insanely massive lighting/thunder storms that rush in faster then a fat kid in willy wonka’s factory and subsequently dump enough monsoon rain to make it feel like you woke-up in the middle of a CIA waterboarding torture). Anyways enjoy some of the photos of random things around Denver:
Caitlin enjoying the lush landscape (a nice benefit of the recent weather) of Three Sisters park:
Getting some climbing done at the Corridor area in Castlewood (with Jake, Trent, and Bethany):
Getting one small day of wake-boarding in at Horsetooth Reservoir (with the parental units):
Hiking around Mt. Evans and Echo Lake (with Caitlin):
Watching some Fireworks over Lake Dillon from some random pontoon-boat that we hopped in at that was parked at one of the piers (with Caitlin, Trent and Bethany):
Getting some sport-climbing done at Castlewood (with Ben, Andrew, Beth, Whitney, Caitlin, Tyler, and Kevin):
Well a quickly planned Friday night excursion (5/15/09) to Castlewood turned out to be a hell of a good time. Grabbing a 30 rack of Tecate and with seven total people we tore-up our hands in the fountainebleau area of c-wood. Getting there at 6:45pm and leaving at 9:00pm was just perfect.
Note: Undergoing some changes to the site, if you notice anything wacky please leave a comment or send me a note.
Date: Feb 22nd, 2009
So the day after skiing with Tim Spano and crew we went back to Zuma for a little more action. While the snow was not the greatest we still sent some pretty sick lines.
Evan put down a line in the Washout area that is one of the steepest lines possible at Zuma. When looking at the slides #19-22, the duration of time is less then a second and the speed generated from that initial turn was pretty insane to watch. I was standing out on a cliff point and apparently need to re-shoot the line to give a better perspective of the sheer size of the line. The last slide (#27) shows most of the line and the three turns over 700-800 ft of vert.
Enjoy the slides:
The long lost Tim Spano meandered his way back on an apparent epic journey back to the land of the free, hot-dogs, PBR, and of course snow. Finally got to spend some time skiing Zuma with him and his gf Sabrina which turned out to be a pretty good day on a couple of fresh inches.
Anyways here is a collection of the photos from that day in easy to use slideshow format!!! Let me know what you think of the format via the comments (or if you are lucky enough to socially interact with me you could tell me at that time as well), I have also included a few of the better photos for download at the bottom as well.
Thanks to Sabrina for taking good photos while I was skiing!!!!
This is a first. Normally I only post stuff that is directly related to some activity that I did or was a part of; however it has come to my attention that sometimes great internet finds need to be shared with the larger audience.
Therefore I present to you the new, but infrequent “Random Items of Interest”. I promise I will try to keep it on topic about outdoors and what-not; however if you know me you know I always bring in about four hundred unrelated topics to try to describe a situation. So we will see where this goes:
#1 Item today:Matt Holden in Backcountry Magazine:
My buddy Matt Holden has been recently published in Backcountry Magazine with a badass photo of him skiing while he was in Japan last winter. Featured none the less on the Table of Contents page. Photo taken by http://www.marcdurand.com/
#2: Collection of Recent Badass Ski Trip Reports by People I Don’t Know:
Click around and check out the 250+ photos here. None of them suck, in fact most of them are insanely awesome. You can spend some serious time looking at all of these.
Winter has been treating Colorado well lately, you know 60 degree temps in Denver while it continues to snow in the high-country…can’t really complain.
Finally had a chance to get out there and ski Montezuma again (been 8 months!!!) and luckily for us the mountain gods were kind enough to give us perfect snow, amazing weather, and some damn-fine lines.
Date: January 17th, 2009
Location: Deer Creek Valley, Montezuma, Colorado
Crew: Trent, Evan, Matt, and myself
Trent dropping into the Steeps (2nd line of the day):
Evan on the first line of the day (approx time 9:30 am):
Myself (lookers left) and Matt (right) eyeing our respective virgin lines:
Trent dropping in via “Baby Notch”, him and Evan both had to crawl into the chute to hit this line:
Evan did essentially the same line and Trent took some video of it.
Spent a chilly but beautiful weekend camping with Rambo, Chris and Page down in Elevenmile Canyon, which is a little bit outside of Colorado Springs. Really sweet place, while we didn’t have a whole lot of time there, but we covered a fair amount of ground.
The canyon is awesome as it is where the South Platte flows from a dam so the river is running full even at this time of the year. The area has a large amount of trad, sport, and boulder routes as well some sweet fishing. Anyways tried to take some shots but didn’t do a whole lot of photographing, but here is what did take place.
Here is some bouldering on the first night after we cooked dinner:
Spillway Campground A: Dragon’s Head Boulder
Anyways spent the first day doing a couple trad climbs with Rambo; hilarious since it has been a few years since I have climbed trad and Rambo has been doing it 3x a week all summer on long Red Rocks climbs in Nevada. Anyways good to mix up the climbing and do something a little different.
Enjoyed a good campfire with a special treat of smores:
Spent the next day trying to get to the Murray boulders without success due to the cold river crossing. Instead headed-up to a really sweet boulder.
Side view of the Spray Wall Boulder:
Crazy Problem on the side of the Spray Boulder. Has quite the crazy landing as it is all downhill and there is a dynamic move a few moves up.
*Well not technically french, more of a dirt-bag with a mustache that airs of superiority while subtlety saying “please be quiet as I sit in my bourgeoisie-cafe sipping my espresso while I comment on all of your imperfections”
So that flying Frenchman is RAMBO who happened to take some time off from his nomadic lifestyle to hang-out in Colorado for a couple weeks.
We took a crew to the Corridor area (September 28th) at Castlewood for some fun problems with nice flat landings.
Here is Ben working on one of the many problems we did that day:
Andrew working on one of the dyno problems:
Rambo showing us a better view of the area:
Ben…doing what he does best. Has the jump height for the dyno, has his hand on the hold in the perfect spot, is looking right at the hold, forgetting to actually hold-on (x4):
We also climbed at the creek boulders for our warm-up (fun little cluster right next to Cherry Creek). Rambo working on a sharp problem:
More Pics (plus the ones already included in the post):
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