Category: Thrillhead archives- July 2008

Colorado Trail Race

Posted by Frank – July 26, 2008

The Colorado trail race. 530 miles. 60,000′ of vertical gain. Get on your bike outside of Denver, ride it until Durango on the Colorado Trail (with some detours due to wilderness areas). No support, no entry fee, no help if something goes wrong. Check it out: link1
link2

I’ve got a couple of friends doing it this year- Ethan Passant and Alison Gannett. The more I think about it, the more I think I might want to do it next year in a twisted kind of way.

It’s certainly fun to think about riding all that amazing singletrack. And equally interesting to think about all of the logistics- there are only a few towns where you can re-load on food and other supplies, and everything else, like camping gear, you need to take with you. No fancy HID lights here, there’s no way to re-charge them (except perhaps one of those little backpacker solar panels, hmmmn?)– most will go with regular batteries and headlamps.

Anyway, maybe next year. Until then, good luck to Alison and Ethan!!

****Postscript: Ethan won!!! Alison unfortunately got sick in summit county and is waiting for next year.

Sean Crossen’s 14er skiing video

Posted by Frank – July 21, 2008

Crossen 14er video

Sean put this video together a while back documenting his efforts to ski all the fourteeners. While he ultimately came up a little bit shy, he put in a great effort and skied an awful lot of peaks in winter-like conditions, quite unlike my effort which tended to mostly occur in the spring. Lots of guest appearances from “The Crew”, too- guys like Pete and Jasper and Webster and even the O.G. Lou Dawson on El Diente. It’s well worth checking out, although perhaps with the music muted ;)

Some highlights: Pete and his huge pack unable to mount his bike to get up the Maroon Creek road around 10:30. Faceplant!!! Wendy Fischer shredding Wetterhorn in early season conditions around 17:25

More from the Hippy Homestead

Posted by Frank – July 19, 2008

In my last entry I talked about Sandy the turkey. I took some photos a while back of “the Hippy Homestead”, as the owners jokingly call it, a while back. First off, here’s a photo of my favorite duck, Don King:

Ummn, baby bacon ;)

Swix is a cool dog:

Here’s the strawbale house:

There is some stick framing, but the strawbales are also structural. The R-value is huge. The owners are trying to keep most of the materials local whenever possible. They have now moved on to “stucco-ing” the inside and outside of the house, which is made up of dirt which is hand-sifted on site, plus more straw, lime, and poop from these goats:

All in all, it’s a pretty cool, holistic, back-to-the-earth way of building a house. It’s not the fastest, but the slam-bam houses that get built today aren’t exactly all that healthy with all the formaldehyde soaked lumber and other nasty substances. Here’s one last photo of the inside, with a little better view of the strawbales:

“Sandy” the Turkey

Posted by Frank – July 17, 2008

So I’ve been doing some drywall for some folks who run a really low-key organic farm- they’ve got some chickens, goats, pigs, ducks, and turkeys. The house they are building is strawbale. I’ll talk more about that in another blog entry. A few nights ago, a bunch of chickens and all but one of the turkeys were killed by a fox (probably a fox). The only Turkey survivor is named “Sandy”. I’ve never been around turkeys before, but I must say that Sandy is full of personality. Sandy follows around any human or dog on the property, probably scared out of his mind after watching all his fellow turkeys die and getting a chunk of his own flesh chewed off by the fox. It’s kind of cute to watch this turkey follow people around all day, and constantly turkey-talking to them as well. Anyway, I’ve decided that turkeys are pretty cool, and that Ben Franklin was probably on to something when he nominated the turkey to be the symbol of the USA, rather than the bald eagle. On the other hand, a bird that mostly eats dead fish is probably more symbolic of this country these days, anyway. ;)

Some thoughts on skiing the Fourteeners…. July 9 2008

Posted by Frank – July 9, 2008

Shortly after finishing the fourteeners, the local paper wrote up a little article about it. Since then, with Crested Butte being the small town that it is, I’ve had a lot of folks asking me questions about it, such as “Which one was the hardest?” “Which one was your favorite?”, etc. Here’s a few answers…

Hardest- That one is easy, it was Capitol, without a doubt.

Favorite- That’s a little tougher. Each and every fourteener (or any mountain, for that matter) has redeeming qualities for an addict like me. Overall, though, the Landry line on Pyramid is the best- it’s huge (over 4k’ of vert), and steep, and aesthetic, and one I’ll hopefully do again some day. Some other favorites include:
Crestone Needle, S couloir
North Maroon, N face
Maroon (S), SW couloir
Sneffels, Snake couloir
Wilson Peak, NE face
Castle, E face and S face
I could do these routes again, for sure. Notice how well the Elks are represented? ;)

Least favorite-
Princeton, Columbia and Bross all have zero chance of ever feeling my skis make turns on them again.

Most rewarding-
Capitol

Most disappointing-
Little Bear (It’s one of the hardest in the summer, but in spring, it felt short and tame)

Anybody out there have some other questions along those lines?

Independence Day: July 6th, 2008

Posted by Frank – July 6, 2008

No, no, you say- Independence Day is the Fourth of July. But today, July 6, those of us residing in CO are truly free from the tyranny of silly outdated misguided moralistic laws. Yes that’s right, even though today is a Sunday, you can buy beer, and not that horrible 3.2 stuff at the grocery store. You can also make yourself a cocktail, or enjoy a bottle of wine with dinner if you forgot to pick a bottle up the day before.

Cheers! ;)