Christmas in Colorado

Colorado was having another bleak snow year until just a couple of weeks before we were scheduled to go up to the cabin. Some time in late November/early December, it was 70° up in the mountains. Luckily, shortly  after, it started snowing consistently until right before we got there. Not much of Loveland was open when we first started riding, but by the end of our trip, a lot of new terrain had opened.

Trey and I arrived late Friday night, planning on getting a couple of days of riding in before the rest of our family arrived Sunday afternoon. We had planned on meeting at the Denver airport when both our flights arrived at midnight, picking up the rental car, then driving to the cabin. This plan had worked pretty well for us for our 4th of July trip, but this time, it backfired pretty badly. My flight out of Portland was delayed by three hours. Luckily, the car rental company let Trey pick up our car (which was in my name), but he still had to wait nearly four hours for me to arrive.

By the time my flight landed, I got my snowboard from the checked baggage, and we were leaving the airport, it was after 3 am. We decided not to stop for groceries, which was our original plan, and head straight for the cabin.

Arriving at the cabin near 4.30am, we had decided to forgo turning on the water and just get the heat running so we could go to bed faster. Unfortunately, the world had other plans for us. We opened the cabin door to find packrat poop everywhere. Literally. Everywhere. There was poop on every surface imaginable  from beds, to tables, to the back of the couch and every chair. The rats had chewed the wax from a candle on the table and the mats in the bottom of the sink. The vacuum crapped out on our last trip to the cabin, so we were left with using a tiny, half-broken dirt devil to suck up the frozen turds.

Luckily, because the doors had been closed to two of the rooms, their beds had been spared from the wrath of the rats. It was after 6 am before Trey and I got to crawl into those beds, me sleeping in full clothes on a frozen, rock hard foam mattress that didn't warm up until about 10 am.

Despite the setbacks, we woke up the next morning to a warm cabin, got the water running, and made it to the ski area around noon for a solid four hours of riding.

After the long night and first day of riding, Trey and I had one more mission to accomplish before the rest of the family arrived. We had to find the perfect Christmas tree. Just before dark, we set off up the mountain, ladder and saw in hand. We scouted several trees, but it seemed that every one was too thin to make a decent Christmas tree. Until we spotted the perfect one. We set the ladder up and were able to cut just the top seven feet of the tree, leaving the rest to grow, and giving us the best Christmas tree we'd ever found.



The snowy weather trend continued for the week that we were there and though not much terrain was open, we couldn't have gotten luckier with the conditions. We didn't take many pictures this trip, but I did get a lot of footage on my GoPro. I'm working on editing the video now and I'll post it as soon as it's finished.



Update 3/23/2012:
I finally finished the video. It took a couple months of editing, but I think it's one of the best results I've gotten . It's the first video I did full post production on, including editing, color correction, and motion graphic titles

Christmas In Colorado 2012 from Nathan Fletcher on Vimeo.

Flying in Oregon

It's been a little while since my last post and that is consistent with the amount of adventures I had over that period. After the rain started in October, it's been much more difficult to motivate myself to get outside.

Contrary to how it should be, I've use the poor weather as an opportunity to get back into flying. I found a small airport just outside of Portland and contacted a flight instructor there. I needed to get checked out in a rental plane so that I could fly on my own out here. It's taken three flights over the course of three months to accomplish that, mostly because of weather. We've planned to fly at least half-a-dozen times and been rejected by the weather. At least twice, my instructor and I showed up at the airport expecting to fly, only to find that the depression that the airport sits in is socked in by fog or a low cloud layer.

Just yesterday, we had the first clear weekend day that I've been in town for in the past couple of months. We took advantage of the opportunity and had a nice leisurely flight in the area so that Mike could show me the landmarks (on our previous flights, we'd been dodging low clouds at only about 1,500' AGL, so I couldn't get a sense of the area). The sky was incredibly clear and from our vantage point at 4,500', we could see out to the coast to the west and all of the nearby volcanoes to the east, some a couple hundred miles away.

One of the reasons it took three flights to get checked out was because of the unusual traffic pattern at our local airport. It's a small airport, with a short, 2,400 ft sloped runway. Normal procedure at Twin Oaks Airpark is to take off downhill on runway 20 and land uphill on runway 02 (different ends of the same runway, for those not familiar with runway nomenclature). As you can imagine, this can create some very interesting situations. It apparently doesn't happen too often, but on my first flight there, as I was on short final for 02, my instructor noticed a plane beginning its takeoff roll on 20, heading straight for us. We immediately pushed the power in and went around, narrowly escaping what would have been a certain collision.

The departing  plane had not been making radio calls, and even after our go around, was completely oblivious to our presence. Needless to say, I'm much more vigilant of other traffic now.