Le Raid Blanc: Old School Rando

As our team, representing the Smugglers’ Notch resort, lined up on the Italian side of the Matterhorn for the first stage of Le Raid Blanc, a pretty blonde woman stepped up and handed us RECCO strips. They looked like Band-Aids. “Pour le . . . uh, for ze shoes,” she said. We stuffed them in our pockets; we didn’t have time to stick them on our ski boots.

New Kids on the Block, Part 2

The town won its case against Don Nordlander and his mining equipment across the street from us on South Cora. We didn’t have to testify.

New Kids on the Block

An obituary in the Montrose Daily Press did more than catch my eye; it brought on a flood of unpleasant memories from our early years in Ridgway.

Slow Lift Movement

People bitch about old, slow chairlifts, but they have their up-sides.

Alta’s Alf Engen used to say he preferred the crowd hanging up in the air, rather than descending the slopes en masse.

A Fork in the Road

As the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade came and went last week, I thought, inevitably, about the abortion I caused, struggled with, decided on and went through with, in 1967, six years before the Supreme Court made the procedure legal.

X (Rated)

I had three reasons for going over to Aspen last Friday during the XGames. One was to meet up with skiing friends who have known each other since childhood and tell the most amazing tales on chairlift rides. Like the time one of them had a tarantula the size of a grapefruit in his swim trunks.

A Death in Colona

We first saw her nibbling saltbrush outside the living room window. She was a small-to-medium sized doe with a scraggly winter coat, long eyelashes and huge, scanner ears.

Winter Storm Gandolf

I came into the breakfast room at the Best Western motel in Burley, Idaho, to find seven FedEx drivers eating biscuits and gravy and fiddling with their hand-held devices.

We were all stranded.

100 Names for Snow

This week’s lexicon: snow on cars.

The other day after work, I grabbed the scraper and broom thinking I’d need both to prepare my windshield for the drive home. It had snowed lightly during the day in Ridgway; the Saab was dusted all over, like a powdered donut.

A World of Pain and Magic

Yesterday, Dec. 29, was my sister Polly’s birthday. She would have been 62.