Day 9: Norelco Land

Saturday, December 26 in Telluride, as many of  you will recall, was cold as shit. The high at the top of the ski area was 3. All day that was as "warm" as it got. We opted for a ski area day, because we had just received 51" of snow in 7 days and the area was skiing great. We did a few hike-to's and a few Gold Hills and it was still truly a struggle for me to stay warm. Truthfully, I did not dress appropriately. (You know what they say: there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes). I should have worn my insulated pants and "Down Patrol" giant marshmallow puffy jacket. The coldest part of my body - believe it or not - was my ass. When I got home and took a shower, my ass was so cold that the hot water of the shower turned cold when it hit my backside and ran down my legs. I shit you not. I almost came down the stairs to show JC how red my ass was before I got in the shower but decided that was weird and didn't do it.

Anywho, the point of that is leading into our Sunday Dec. 27 ski tour. I had to work on Christmas Day, but my awesome boss said I could come in at 10 and our Big Plan was to get up early (which we did, at 5am), leave the house at 6 (which we did, in a white-out blizzard), drive to Ophir and start skinning at 6:30. Here is where the plan goes awry. In these parts, weather can be very isolated, so we figured, let's start driving and see what happens. It is not out of the realm of possibility to get to Ophir and it is not snowing at all.

On this day, Christmas, that was not the case. We made it as far as the Mountain Village entrance:

 and decided to turn back and wait for the lifts to start running so I could get a couple of runs in before work. It was a great decision. I got to talk to my family on Christmas morning, and we were some of the first folks to ski down Coonskin, which had been groomed the night before but now held somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 inches or so on it, so we just bombed down it together, twice, then parted ways so I could ski to work.

So. That was 12/25. 12/26 we skied on the freezing cold ski area and Sunday, 12/27, we head out to Ophir for our once-a-week ski tour. 

It was kind of tricky when we started to talking about our plan for the day. I have an admitted insecurity about how tired I get and how much I enjoy periods of rest, mainly because JC has the endurance and stamina of a goddamn moose, whereas I tend to vacillate between periods of high energy and motivation and lower energy and the desire to lie in bed and read all day, interspersed with sunbathing (summer), yoga (any season), and sipping tea/nibbling dark chocolate (winter). Sunday morning I was tired. Tired from the increased work over the holidays, tired from the brutal cold and skiing the day before, tired from the darkest part of the year, whatever, I was just tired.

So when we start to talk about what our plan is for the day, I am thinking, shit, here I am all tired again, am I going to have to be the one to say, the idea of nibbling dark chocolate while loading more books on my kindle is infinitely more appealing than putting on my ski boots and bracing against the cold?

Thankfully, JC said he was looking for a moderately easy and safe ski tour "just to get outside for a while." I suspect he was lying but who cares, it worked. And it was warming up nicely so far.

The avalanche warnings had gone from flashing red, to red, to orange, from several days ago and we are looking for terrain that had been skied already. Where we park in East Ophir we can see Jane's and Mustang, and surprisingly, neither had tracks on them, which left us thinking about alternatives to the usual routes down Swamp, as we were guessing it had not been skied either. There appeared to be one set of tracks ahead of us, but that's not really good enough. We were looking for some skier compaction and evidence that what we wanted to ski looked pretty safe.

The forest this day is beautiful. It has snowed so much that the inner branches of the spruce trees, all the way to the trunks, were plastered with snow.

As we ski up the Swamp track, we notice that the person ahead of us has skied the meadows, that the skin track kind of meanders in and out of. So there goes the possibility that the person ahead of us has skied the Main Event, and we start to consider the brilliant idea of doing what they did. Tree skiing at this low angle is incredibly safe, and so far we are only seeing one track. 

We get up to a place where we can peer out onto the Main Event and no, it has not been skied. The decision was made. We will ski Swamp Meadows, which I am secretly more excited about because it looks super fun and different and I am kind of scared of Swamp today.

We ski down through a couple of beautiful snowy meadows, loving every minute of it, then put our skins back on and head up to do it again, but possibly explore poking out into a new area. Which we do. This takes us back down to the road but is a little more roly-poly and exciting, as the snow is still incredible and it was like our own magical little land.

JC was fortunate enough to have the whole week off from work, and happened to run into some friends  a few days later as he was skiing in Ophir and when he described where we skied, they said, oh that is called Norelco Land! Like the ads for Norelco razors from the 70s:

Check out Santa zipping around on that incredible snow!

Anyway, we made the best of it and discovered a whole new zone that is super safe and the snow is really good. We will let someone else be the first people to ski out in the open, while we tool around in the meadowy trees, laughing at how little we need to have a fun day outside.