Day 6: Back on the Road

Black Friday Edition 

All relaxing things have to come to an end and around 1PM today, Nathan and I took our last few turns in CO before loading up the gear and driving out of the mountains. It’s hard to call any part of this trip “difficult”—this is kind of the life we’ve dream about living for a while and we’re lucky enough to do it for a month or so. But in all the time we spent in Colorado, we kind of forgot we were traveling. The house we were leant for the week was fantastically comfortable, the beer was great, and there was enough football and James Bond happening alongside some great skiing that packing up actually felt like the end of a great vacation. Turns out things are just getting started.

Before we left our cozy haven, we got to check mountain #6 off our list—Beaver Creek—which now puts Nathan and me at #121 and #122 respectively. But rankings don’t count at all in this stage of the race, so I’ll focus on two other equally important races.

Race #1: The Women’s World Cup Downhill:

The World Cup descended on Beaver Creek earlier this week to begin training, and for the first time today started up racing. We haven’t really been spending too much time around The Creek during the day on account of tons of skiing, so this was our first time actually finding our way around the mountain, and it turns our it’s pretty big. How big? Big enough that you can have a world class alpine race about 3 minutes away from the town center and literally have no idea. But not too much of the mountain was open, so we hopped in a shuttle bus to get us over to the finish where we caught this scene.

The Women’s Downhill featured a few brave Americans which was great news because I finally had a reason to break out the giant American flag I’ve been carrying with me all this time.

They were racing a new course this year called “Raptor” which is the sister course to internationally feared men’s course, “Birds of Prey.” If you think the names are a bit much, yea, they sound kind of absurd, but in reality these things are terrifyingly fast and tricky. Looks like the Swiss won the day, but there’s tons more racing on tap for this season, and Nathan and I are moving around mountains so much that we’ll actually catch our boys (and girls) again over in France, where I’m sure even more obnoxious use of our Red, White & Blue friend will go over well.

This brings me to the more important of the two races.

Race #2: Race back to the Skis—Black Friday Edition:

Some readers may remember that I suffered a brutal loss to Mr. Friendly a few days ago at A-Basin when we both undertook the tradtional Race Back to the Skis. The rules of such a race are very clear:

1. First person to the skis is a champion
2. Fairness is a myth
3. Brutal physical contact is mandatory
4. Winner has bragging rights until they lose a rematch

It’s been tough, waking up every morning, carrying this burden of loss on my shoulders so we set a rematch for Black Friday at the McCoy Nordic Center on a remote peak of Beaver Creek. In honor of this great American semi-holiday, the first two people into the nordic park won a free pair of skis, that may or may not happen to already belong to them. It went a little something like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKPeoSIUSSM&app=desktop

It definitely helped with crowd control that there were only two people in the race, and the only other potential competitors were a nice group of 70-year-olds snowshoing around a picturesque cluster of nearby aspen trees. But hey, looks like Nathan has now fallen to last place in the Race back to the Skis Power Rankings and that’s all that matters. We’ll see what tomorrow holds.

So that’s it for the racing for now, we are truly on the road. I’m writing this from our gate at the Denver airport after staring down several sassy middle schoolers for outlet space to plug in my Mac. And as we’re about to board, I’ll leave everyone with one of my favorite observations of the trip yet that could only have come when we packed up. I bring you….

Things on our coffee table today:

1. A standard ARM microcontroler (Nathan’s a nerd)
2. 1 passport
3. 12 trail maps
4. a basket of fake apples
5. 1 real apple
6. 1 flask
7. 3 burnt out Hello Kitty/Hanukkah candles
8. 2 empty beer bottles
9. keys to my house in Hanover
10. keys to Nathan’s house in Hanover
11. 2 Go Pros
12. and last but not least…a pervasive sense of fatigue

Well, they’re calling boarding now, so that’s all for the day (and please excuse any typos). Utah tomorrow to see some great friends and ski a semi-open mountain before hitting the road again.

Cheers,

Eric