home on the (mountain) range

Ryan and I were sponsors on Highland & Madison's ski trip to Colorado. I rode the bus out and he flew into Denver on Friday night. We had a great trip with perfectly-timed snow!

Life on the bus. Fortunately for us, we get to borrow SAU's bus for the 24-hour trip out to Colorado. There are sets of 4 seats in back that face each other. Kids fought over those and they were always the first seats taken.

The other great feature was the bathroom, coming in handy when we're forcing everyone to drink 1/2 liter of water an hour all the way out to combat altitude sickness.

Here's the tumbleweed we woke up to in Limon, CO. I ate at Denny's with some kids that morning after a pretty good night sleeping on two seats in the bus.



Me watching for bighorn sheep out the bus window. We saw quite a few in between Denver and the Loveland pass.




Our condo family of 8 girls minus Rachel & Rachel. We sat down to meals together every night. I only had to make one meal the whole week and they took care of the rest. They were really on top of cleaning up too.

Since the Adventist Winterfest was cancelled this year, we had the opportunity to have our Sabbath school/church program in our clubhouse. Debbie Morgan (possibly a PE major with my dad?) talked about being a student missionary and Dan Johnson shared a sermonette. We had a great lunch of baked potatoes, choplets, green beans, salad, and brownies in this same room later.

One of my favorite pictures from the trip. I think I was standing on a pile of old plowed snow.


John is a new recruit to the Settlers crowd. After playing with Randy & Mary Jane the week before, he was pretty excited to keep playing. I attempted to teach them Cities & Knights on Saturday night, but it got so late, I don't think my brain was still working. We hoped John would come back and finish the game with us, but his work schedule made that impossible.

If you ask Ryan what his favorite part of this trip was, he'd probably say it was chasing me around with our new video camera. We probably broke a lot of the usage recommendations in the manual by flying through the trees and down steep slopes while videoing, but the footage is pretty hilarious.

Ryan on a black run that we dropped into from the Otto Bahn blue run in the bowls. It was so pretty back there, but with all the warm weather and not much new snow, it was still pretty icy.

Here's a long story, hopefully shortened a little:
Ryan and I take 5 girls into Silverthorne on the shuttle. They go to Target, we don't. We meet them back at the shuttle and head back to the condo.

Two minutes before my stated "lights out" time, they're all suspiciously in the kitchen. They tell me they're making pudding. I (frustrated) tell them to hurry up and finish it and go to bed.

Later, I wake up hearing random beeping, but go back to sleep. Around midnight, they pound on my door. Angry at this point, I open the door and they start singing "Happy Birthday" with this cake. They didn't find anything to light the "3" candle, so Christen makes hand motions to represent the candle. I felt dumb for being frustrated with them, and was glad they celebrated my birthday.

Birthday weather forecast. We must have been good, because we got snow!

How's this for a view? Feel like you're gonna fall off the earth? Welcome to a black run, Cabin Chute, in the bowls.

Rachel pinning on my "Birthday Girl" ribbon for the last few hours of my birthday. Their intent was for me to wear it all day, but they forgot to give it to me. Rachelle got to wear it on Tuesday for her birthday on the 10th! She wore it on her helmet all day, which you can see in the pictures below.

A drastic change from the first two sunny days we had. We woke up on March 10 to 6-8" of fresh powder with more coming steadily. We had a hard time just getting from our condo to the bus (of course, I had my insulated Crocs on and that didn't help . . .).

A taste of the level of visibility. Laura and someone (?) ride the High Point chair lift. It was brutal out there until about noon. The wind chill was -15 degrees F with an actual temperature of 10 degrees. My tube to the water reservoir on my backpack froze solid within the first few minutes.

terrain park tricks
Josh actually didn't land his jump and threw his arms back. He chipped his ulna at the elbow.

Ryan, Ruben, Michael, and Rachelle at the top of the Rendezvous lift. This is a great backdrop, don't you think?

Rachelle took this picture of us at the top of the Rendezvous lift with a view of the Ten Mile Range behind us. Most of the bowl lifts were closed after we got the snow dumped on us. I think they only kept one open.

Here's a picture of my blades in the powder on late Tuesday afternoon. Ryan's feet kept getting cold because they were continually under snow.

Rachel Hacker took a picture of the three of us at the top of the American Flyer lift. I was glad John was able to spend his day off with us at Copper.

Ryan and John coming down the Indian Ridge (black) run from the top of the Flyer lift.

John making fresh tracks in the powder.

This shot is actually pretty open compared to most of the stuff we were in during the day. I believe this was shortly after John jumped across a creek on a log!

John snapped a couple pictures of Ryan and I on the Coppertone run. The weather was perfect and we had a great day skiing mostly in the trees.











A very rare picture of John knocked off his two feet! Sometimes the deep powder gets the better of you, but it sure doesn't hurt falling down in it!



This picture of Ryan carving toward me was one of my favorites when I got back and loaded the pictures onto my computer.

These next three pictures were from our last run before Ryan and John left for the airport. I had fun catching their jumps and like how the pictures show their movement. It's just as much fun taking pictures as it is to ski!