several crazy weeks

I haven't posted anything on here in a month... Since the previous post / rant I have moved into my first condo... and am therefore a new home owner. I'll keep the long story short and just say that I didn't close on the day that I wanted to, but still was able to move in and wound up finding a new lender to close with 3 days later. All is coming together well at the new place... even Tacoma has adjusted and enjoys the new terrain to explore. Friday I had my housewarming party, and hope it will be the first of many. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. We kept it small enough to be cozy, but maybe next time I'll crank it up a notch and test the capacity of the place.

Aside from the move, I also am newly AIARE Level 1 certified. I took the class up Boulder Canyon at Eldora Ski Resort.


I learned a lot, and we had decent snow for digging and skiing despite the incredibly dry winter in the Front Range.

The class was 2 nights of lecture followed by 2 days in the field. Our first day in the field was primarily spent on beacon practice, and timing teams digging up dummy avalanche victims. It was pretty tough, and made me think twice about the severity of being stuck in a slide. I really hope I never have to dig a buddy up, knowing they'll be purple if I find them at all. The second field day we dug a snow pit and did more layer analysis. The snow science was really interesting to me, and I think I'll wind up getting my level 2 next year. The payoff at the end of the second day was the backcountry skiing. Since conditions were not very favorable, we weren't able to ski anything very steep, but I got my first out of bounds turns in nonetheless, and enjoyed it. I have to say, though, 2 days on alpine trekkers have reinforced the need to either switch to tele skiing or get an AT setup before I start seriously considering big tours. This, plus my signing up for some rock climbing and snow climbing classes definitely are a step towards checking off more of my 2009 goals, mentioned in a January post.

Snow is in the forecast for the mountains, but it's been 70+ degrees in Boulder for a while, so it's doubtful much will stick in town even if snow falls. With the nice weather, last week I took my first hike up to Mt. Sanitas right outside of Boulder. It's about 3 miles round trip, and the views are well worth the work to get to the top. You can see quite a ways to both east and west, with great views of the Indian Peaks to the west. There seemed to be decent bouldering along the ridge, so I'll definitely be doing some climbing up there this summer. It's tough to talk about summer already, but it seems inevitable. I'm disappointed in this ski season, but imagine few future seasons will compare to my first real one last year. I hope to get some more days in this year, and the storm coming in this week should help, but only time will tell... fingers crossed!