Enjoying and escaping winter

I'm not homeless anymore

From December 10th, when I left for our winter break trip, till January 15th, when I moved into my new house, I didn't officially have a place to stay. During our trip we were almost every day moving to a new location and staying in motels or camping. When I returned to Grand Junction I had permanent place stay at my friends' house for a couple of weeks but when you are a guest at somebody's house it's not quite the same as having your own place to live. Well I still have three roommates but you know what I mean.

Our new house is quite nice and spacious and despite being built in 1930s everything seems to work. We have a well-organized kitchen, a laundry machine and a dryer, and garage for all our bikes. But most importantly we have a dishwasher and a coffee maker (trust me, after drinking instant coffee nearly every morning for the past month, this feels amazing). And my roommates are cool, funny and appropriately weird (I know they don't mind me using this expression) athletes so we get along great!

Our house

Internship

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts my internship consists of being the assistant coach of the ski team and an assistant in the exercise lab on campus. Since my major is Sport Coaching and Fitness Testing this is an excellent combination. In addition I can learn coaching and testing practices of a foreign country and get familiar with different exercise testing equipment. The only issue that I've come to find out is that everyone seems to be even too flexible regarding my tasks. This just means that I have to be initiative myself. And obviously it also makes it easier for me to plan my recreational activities. Having seven weeks to complete 100 hours of internship means that I don't really have to do normal 8-hour work shifts (and with this attitude I'm probably going to do just this during the last week).

Yet another new outdoor activity

Speaking about the recreational activities, winter, ice, snow and cold weather is not seen as an obstacle but an opportunity for climbing. In Ouray (about two-hour drive South from Grand Junction) they have a canyon where they make artificial frozen waterfalls by spraying water from the top every night. This creates amazing and fairly constant conditions for ice climbing. With some friends from the ski team we decided to go there during Ice Festival a couple of weeks ago. This meant that there were way more climbers at the site but also that we could demo some fancy gear, enjoy the carnival-like atmosphere and participate in several raffles besides climbing.

I was being told that ice climbing is way easier than rock climbing. So when I went for my first climb I decided I'm just gonna crush it and get to the top in no time. Quickly I noticed that ice climbing is not just smashing your tools and crampons to the ice but some technique could be useful. I ended up falling (obviously there was a rope attached to my harness) two or three times and dropping quite a bit of ice down to the canyon. I also knew that the water spraying system goes on at 4pm, I had started the climb at 3:35 and I didn't know what time it was, so I was slightly worried. Eventually (and before I got water all over me) I got to the top breathing heavily and with my forearms burning from grasping the tools. In the evening we got to enjoy some hot spring pools and have a couple a beers at the local pubs for celebration of my birthday.

The next day before I climbed again I saw this lady instructing a group of beginners about ice climbing technique and decided to watch and listen for a while. As a result my next climb went a lot smoother, I didn't fall once, I wasn't nearly as exhausted and my arms were not burning (the better demo tools and crampons helped too). Yet another cool outdoor sport that would be nice to do more but that would require a lot of time and money.

Ice climbing setup (notice the stylish pink harness)

In the middle of a climb

Another angle

Hot spring pool

Festival atmosphere

Road trip number 2

Ice climbing was the enjoying winter part, so what about the escaping? My father attended an outdoor exhibition in Las Vegas so it only made sense for us to have short vacation together. On Wednesday evening two weeks ago after working the whole day in the lab I picked up my rental car and drove to Vegas (it was almost next door, only 500 miles). From there we drove to La Quinta, California the next day. There we played a round of golf on one day and watched a PGA Tour (golf) competition the next.

According to one of the employees they save 65 000 gallons of water a year when they only water the fairways

My first time as a spectator in a golf event

Then we drove to Phoenix, Arizona and spent the next two days mountain biking in the area. First day's location was McDowell Mountain Regional Park. By happy coincidence local bike shop had a bike demo at the site at the same time. It was nice to test some carbon full-suspension bikes on great trails, especially since my rental bike wasn't that special.

In Arizona you have to be careful with the cacti

 

 For the second day we had planned to do part of Black Canyon Trail. Since we only wanted to do the section one way, we had to leave our car at the "finish line" and try to hitch a ride to the beginning of the trail. Just when we thought that this isn't gonna work a guy with a pick-up truck and a boat on a trailer pulled over (this was at the side of a highway). He was happy to give us a ride, but since his back seats were full of stuff we had to travel on the bed of the truck with our bikes (not something that would happen back home, again remenber it's was on a highway). The trail was awesome with a lot of fast single track and some more technical downhill switchback sections. The only thing was that we had estimated it would take us around 4 hours so we could watch at least most of the Denver Broncos football game after the ride in a pub restaurant located at the "finish line". Well, it took us more like 6 hours so we didn't just miss most of the game but were pretty exhausted after finishing (obviously our water and snack supplies were also calculated based on the 4-hour estimation). But we survived (okay, let's be honest, I wasn't struggling that much) and had a great day!

One of the countless switchbacks

Some sections were little bit more technical

The next couple of days were mostly just driving back to Grand Junction, but on the way we stopped by to see the best preserved meteor crater in the world, visited New Mexico and drove over 3000-meter high mountain pass in excellent weather. In total it was more than 2000 miles of driving within a week.

Meteor crater

View at the top of the mountain pass

And you guessed it: Skiing

What would a blog post be without some story about skiing? Last weekend the conference races for our team began. On Saturday it was classic sprint. Since I haven't tried sprint skiing in high altitude yet (I've already discovered that normal distances in high altitude are not my forte), I decided to participate. Even though the distance was only about 900 meters in that altitude with slow snow it was still around two and a half minutes. In tune with the times I went for double poling on skate skis in all the heats. This ended up being a decent race for me and I eventually finished second. The last time I skied four heats in a sprint event was more than six years ago and the last time I was on a podium in any ski race was even longer ago. On Sunday I was on my right place at the side of the track helping the team with ski testing, spare equipment and cheering!

I was too lazy to take skate boots even though I had both skis (photographer Gerald Smith)