I'm breathing, but standing still....

Welcome to day 3 at Telluride Resort. Still no new snow, so I decided not to alpine ski again. Today it was off the the upper mountain nordic tracks. A high speed quad ride up the hill had my worried about the dismount, but alas no worries. These are at the 11,200' mark. Hence the title. Seemed to be standing still at times, but breathing awful hard!! I guess that proves my adaptation to high altitudes and the increased breathing rate. Anyway, it was a great loop with some short hills intitially, however the cruel joke was these 200 yard "loops" that they groomed taking you downhill to start, only to turn and make you ski back up. After doing this twice on separate loops, I got smart and decided to look for an exit down the trail to see if I was going to get tricked again. (didn't happen).

After, skiing the Magic mountain loop, I decided to head over and try the link loop as well. Not sure what possesed me to try, other than I didn't want to go down. The ski back to the lift top was all uphill, and at 11,000' this feels like running a mile while breathing thru a coffee stirrer. So the link loop starts with looooooong uphill, basically along side a lift. Luckily in the woods so I could hide my embaresment for moving so slow. Luckily I had my pal Jonny (Cash, not Daniels) on the Ipod to push me up the hill. Once at the top it was a long ski down a green groomer ski trail (5k down) to the connecting links back to the resort. All in all a good ski (about 15k) with lots of good views of the peaks and cirques here at the top of the mountain.

Rumors are that a small chance of flurries will come in tommorrow and put down some snow here at the resort. Not sure it will mean much, but maybe a I'll get one day in!!

rk