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.

Avy 1 Course

For several years, I've been interested in backcountry snowboarding. The risk of avalanches has kept me in bounds until I could take a proper avalanche certification course. That was high on my list of things to do this winter and at the beginning of last October, I signed up for a course on Mt. Hood in January.

The course consisted of two evening classroom sessions and a weekend on Mt. Hood. During the classroom sessions, we learned about what causes avalanches, how to travel in avalanche terrain, and how to determine where avalanches live.

In the field sessions, we learned and practiced locating avalanche victims with beacons, probing for them with poles, then digging them out of the snow. We also did a mock backcountry tour on Mt. Hood, skinning around on the hillside assessing for avalanche danger, digging snow pits, and analyzing the snow pack.

I learned a lot and had a lot of fun, but more importantly I am now a safer and more aware backcountry traveler. Avalanches don't just affect skiers and snowboarders, they are a big part of mountaineering, too.

I only ended up with one picture from the course.

Mt. Thielsen and Diamond Peak

On my family's trip to Crater Lake, I noticed a wicked looking mountain as we traveled. It even ended up in the background of some of our pictures. It's Mt. Thielsen and a few weeks ago, I climbed it with the Santiam Alpine Club. It's the second technical peak I've climbed and one of the most fun.

Here's a picture of the mountain showing the gnarly summit. The entire hike toward the mountain, you are just looking at the steep summit block, wondering how you could possible climb it!.

We traveled along the ridge on the right side of the picture up to the summit block.

The summit block doesn't require very difficult climbing, but we did protect the last pitch with rope because there was quite a bit of exposure. Just the week before we were on the mountain, a climber had been rescued after falling and breaking a leg and arm and injuring his head. Here's a picture of the summit block. We climbed the pitch on the left, just above where all the people are standing.


Mt. Thielsen was a lot of fun to climb and since it was such a far drive from Portland, we decided to do two mountains that weekend. On Sunday, we climbed Diamond peak, which isn't a technical mountain, but was nonetheless a lot of fun. In contrast to the clear blue skies we had Saturday, there were low, scattered clouds on Sunday. The clouds made the already pretty hike even more interesting, because we climbed up into them.

This was the view of the mountain from my tent Sunday morning.

The climb to the top of Diamond Peak was mostly a hike, with a few areas requiring two-handed scrambling.  But the view of the mountain and surrounding area were awesome and made the hike a lot of fun.

The summit is just off my left shoulder in this picture.

By the end of the weekend, I'd racked up over 20 trail miles and 7,500 vertical feet. It was a great weekend. Check out the rest of my pictures form the weekend on flickr.

Ice Climbing

After the crevasse rescue class a couple weeks earlier, I was really looking forward to the Santiam Alpine Club's ice climbing program  in the middle of September. We were again on Elliot Glacier and it was incredible to see the changes that had occurred in the snow and ice since I had been on the glacier a month before. The snowfield that we had camped on during the crevasse rescue program was now a rocky and crevassed mess.



We spent the day Saturday and Sunday on the glacier, learning and practicing techniques for climbing vertical ice walls. On Saturday, we found some small, 10-20 foot ice walls that we could walk right up to and practice climbing. I became addicted to ice climbing very quickly. We belayed each other up the ice pitches, then rappelled down them, to squeeze in as much climbing as possible. We also practiced placing ice screws for anchors, using the skills we had learned during the crevasse rescue program. Here's one of the other climbers on one of the ice ledges (I haven't gotten the pictures of me from other people, yet).


Saturday evening, we returned to the campground a couple miles below the glacier (we didn't camp up on the glacier this time) so that we could cook a big group meal. One of the couples that were in the class cooks professionally, so they prepared us an amazing fajita burrito dinner, one of the best I've ever had and the perfect meal after a long day of climbing.

We spent Sunday rappelling and lowering each other 30 feet down into a crevasse and climbing back out of it. Unfortunately, because we had gotten a late start Sunday morning, we only got to spend a few hours on the glacier. I did get some video of me rappelling into and climbing out of a crevasse. I'll post it as soon as I get a chance to edit it.

Ice climbing was a ton of fun and it's definitely something I plan on doing in the future. There's a waterfall across form the cabin in Colorado that I've had my eye on for quite a while now...