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.
Two questions:
ReplyDeletea) How did you know it was packrat poop?
b) Did you find the den with all of our stuff?
Dad identified the poop as some that he saw before he blew insulation in to the walls. He said they lived in the walls when he bought the cabin. I think the problem has reoccurred because of the addition. We didn't find a den, but I think it's somewhere under the cabin. We put out a ton of poison, but we should try and seal the cabin better this summer.
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