Pagosaversary

Yesterday we celebrated one year in Pagosa Springs. It was our Pagosaversary!

And, as it happens, I joined the local gym the day that we arrived, so I just had to pay my annual dues. It comes out to less than $40/month for the two of us, for a full gym and lap pool a half a mile away. I think that’s a good value.

So we’ve lived here for a year. And we still really like it – well, okay, not having any snow in my yard is weird. But we went skiing yesterday, and most of the Texans have left, and Wolf Creek is a really nice place to call your home mountain.

After skiing with Ethel for a while yesterday, she took off to take Juneau snowshoeing, and I did big bumps laps on the Alberta chair. After that, I told her to go ahead and book my trip. So I’m going to Kelowna, British Columbia, the last week of March, to spend five days climbing into helicopters and skiing down big mountains.

We live in remote southwest Colorado, And Kelowna is a sizable city in the middle of BC. And there is no convenient way to get from here to there. So I’m losing a day on either side of the trip to travel. But, again, I suppose it’s worth it. I’m only doing this once. Might as well go big or go home.

This doesn’t affect our travel plans – such as they are – for the Everest Base Camp trek this fall, but Ethel has been shanghied^H^H^H^H^H^H asked to take on the treasurer position at our church, and the budget cycle is in September and October. So that may put the kibosh on trekking in Nepal. Yes, there’s the spring trekking season, but that’s when the farmers in the valleys are burning their fields, and they say that the smoke can get really bad. So we’ll figure it out.

We also want to go to Europe for a while. She wants to see where I spent two years sitting on an M1 Abrams tank keeping the Russians out of Paris, and the beaches at Normandy, and I want to actually jump on trains and just travel around Europe for a while. But I don’t know when we’ll do that. There is only so much time – and there’s only so much money. I have to let our financial advisors refill the tanks after we spend all this money 🙂

Pagosaversary. Funny, we never noted our first year anywhere else. The longest we’ve spent in one home was seven years – that was the first Park City – and the longest that we’ve spent in a single area was eight years – that was Anthem and New River, in Arizona. I’d like to make it here longer than that.

As long as it snows 🙂

A Small Town – But Not My Small Town

There are, of course, some very nice things about living in Pagosa Springs. For instance, last week, when I left the gym, I forgot to lock my locker.

Of course, everything was fine. Nothing was taken, and nobody even bothered to lock it for me 🙂 We don’t worry about such stuff very much here in Archuleta County.

Yes, it’s a small town. And it’s a small town in Southwest Colorado, which – except for the current drought, I really like. (Today it snowed all morning, but it’s been so warm that it just kept melting as it hit). While we’re close to Durango, it doesn’t “lean left”, as folks say. Nobody here has asked me for my pronouns.

But this morning, I had a bit of song lyric stuck in my head as I was getting ready to go to the gym. And it occurred to me that it is entirely possible that nobody in Pagosa Springs had ever heard the song. It’s the old Ray Stevens chestnut, “Jeremiah Peabody‘s Polyunsaturated Quick-Dissolving Fast-Acting Pleasant Tasting Green and Purple Pills.” (Woah yeah).

I was careful not to sing this song while doing my lifting and core routine – however, the gym speakers did play Alanis Morrisette’s “All I Really Want”. I actually have a copy of “Jagged Little Pill”. I hope that she got some therapy, eventually.

But that’s a heck of a juxtaposition, ain’t it? Ray Stevens and the Queen of Angst.

The workout went okay – I was weaker on my pushups and pull-ups than I was last week, but I was a little bit faster on the swim. I wonder if skiing yesterday had any effect. I’m going to have to find a way to ski and also work out. When I look back at my last 100 day year – that’s the winter of 2019-2020 – I see that my working out was hit or miss until the last week of February, when I managed to stick to the plan, while skiing every day, although that all went to heck on the middle of March, when they closed the ski hill and the gym on successive days.

Of course, I was six years younger then.

I haven’t yet booked my heli ski trip. I’m concerned about several things – but, mainly, I doubt my own ability to ski the way that I would need to ski, and keep skiing, to take advantage of that opportunity, Yesterday’s 11,000 feet wore me out. For the aforementioned 100 consecutive days of skiing, back in 19-20, I averaged over 12,000 feet per day – and those 12,000 feet were steeps, bumps and trees, in powder.

That was the year that I was SUPPOSED to go heliskiing in Alaska. I was supposed to go at the end of March. But the day before I left, Alaska closed the doors – something about a global pandemic or something.

Now I’m wondering if I missed my chance.

Winterless

Here’s the tram at Jay Peak, in Vermont.

We’re not there. I’ve tried to get Ethel to go there, but she won’t. She’s so mean and selfish.

Here’s a post from this time last year. I’m not showing you what my back yard looks like now, because it looks exactly like this. Winter just ain’t happening. It’s happening in Vermont, but not in Colorado. Now, I admit, I’m as surprised about this as anyone is. Southwest Colorado has always been a pretty good bet for great skiing and great weather. But not last year, and not this year.

We came to Pagosa for five or six weeks in the winter of 23/24, and the skiing was great – or, at least, that’s the way that I remember it, and that seems to be what this diary says. Right now, here in Pagosa Springs, we’re not wild about the skiing – I went today, and it was better than (say) North Carolina, but there was a lot of, shall we say, firmly packed powder.

But one thing that Southwest Colorado has that Jay Peak will never have – Texans. Lots and lots of Texans. I thought that they would have gone home by now. I was wrong. Now, there are nothing like the throngs of Texans that we had the last two weeks, but there are still plenty, and they fill up the parking lot and the lift lines….and the restaurants, and the stores, and they are all driving all day long everywhere.

Okay, let’s tell the truth and shame the Devil. We won’t be going to Jay Peak, Vermont. We’re going to stay right here. And right here is a whole lot better than (say) Alabama. And who knows? Eventually the Texans will leave, and maybe it’ll start snowing.

But it’s a nice fantasy. Besides, in Newport, VT, I could buy the house I have here for about 200K less. Whups – I forgot. I was going to stop thinking about that.

Aging Is For The Birds

I’ve spent a good bit of time like this, after ski days – taking off my boots and sitting there, looking down at them, meditating or ruminating – usually feeling rather pleased with the ski day.

Today was a pretty good ski day, except for the fact that I can’t ski nearly as much as I could just a few years ago. In the winter of 2019-2020, I skied 100 days in a row, and averaged about 15,000 feet of vertical a day – with almost every foot of that vertical being steeps, bumps and trees. Today, I managed just over 10,000 feet, and I hadn’t skied in several days, and it was almost all groomers.

And yet it left me exhausted. So, while I had that mild bit of post-ski glow, I was aware that things are still going downhill, pretty fast.

Now, we said many years ago that, when we were too old to ski, we’d go live in Latin America on the beach. But now we’ve already lived in Latin America on the beach. Ethel won’t go back to Panama. So I’m pitching Cartagena, Colombia. It’s big enough to have all of the service we need, it’s got three – count ’em, three – Episcopal churches, it has local SCUBA diving, and it’s got to have plenty of meetings. But Ethel won’t even consider it. So, here I am, going downhill fast, and watching my skiability decline, quickly, and can’t do anything about it.

Speaking of which – my cancer doc wants me to get an MRI to see if the illness is progressing, but Aetna says no. I just found out tonight that the pre-authorization had been denied. I don’t know what that means – it may mean that we’ll have to do a biopsy, instead. Or it may mean that I’m just supposed to go up to Camp Bird on the Imogene Pass road and wait for death. I’m not sure.

Kim says “Talk to the doctor on Monday. In the meantime, there’s no reason to be upset.” But I am quietly cursing. Yeah, I’m spoiled – for 30+ years, I was a software engineer, which meant that I had a good income and great benefits. If I needed some kind of medical care, it was simply provided.

Now, I’m supposed to just sit here and die.

But I’m not bitter!

Opening Day

They said that they were opening on Saturday, but only the beginner lift.

But they’ve changed their minds 🙂 There will be at least two of the regular lifts open.

So, tomorrow morning, we’re going to drive up the hill to get in a few runs. It won’t be great, and there won’t be a lot of it, but it’ll be sliding on snow 🙂 We had to go into the attic to get our boot bags, and drop down the Thule to get the ski poles out. For some reason, although we left the skis down in the garage, we put the poles up. No, it doesn’t make sense. But we were in a hurry, I reckon.

I am supposed to ride for 2:15 tomorrow. I don’t know how I’m going to fit it in. I might have to wake up really early and get started while Ethel is still in bed. I’m not doing nearly as much as I used to do, so I really think that I need to be careful to at least do all of the schedule workouts, or I will slide down into the abysmal oblivion of sloth and inactivity.

And, besides, I have that Iron Horse thing schedule for May.

Ethel was talking about cycling the Icefields Parkway from Banff to Jasper, but I think that she’s started to refocus on Everest Base Camp, instead. She’s watching the videos and talking to people. Who, me? Oh, no!…don’t make me trek through Nepal to Everest Base Camp, B’rer Ethel! ….the high point of the trek isn’t at base camp; it’s at the Kala Patthar pass, around 18.500 feet. That’s not Kilimanjaro – in fact, it’s 800 feet lower – but the trek round trip is 130 km or 80 miles, and that’s twice as far as we trekked on Kili. So it’s definitely something to do.*

We leave Monday for Alabama; it seems that the forecast is calling for a lot of snow for the week that we are gone, so things should greatly improve by the time we get back.

Today was a lazy day. We did nothing besides yoga. Ethel is lost in Neal Stephenson’s “SEVENEVES”, and only comes up for air when I make a fuss about it. I’m reading Bosch and Ballard books and taking the odd nap.

Tonight we’re eating Chinese with friends. I’m not hungry, but that’s OK – I’ll figure out some way through the menu without feeling stuffed. And, if I do get stuffed, I’ll be empty in an hour.

*yes, we finished watching Cool Hand Luke today 🙂

Deer Guard

I’m finally getting a deer guard on my Nissan Frontier.

That’s not my truck – that’s a stock photo of a Frontier with this model deer guard on it.

I’ve been waffling on this, but it seems that deer in this area are only getting more and more numerous. Now, I drive to Durango fairly often, and that’s just a long corridor where deer love to jump in front of trucks – but, even here in my neighborhood, they’re everywhere.

And these aren’t those little white tails that my son hunts in Alabama – these are big, honkin’ mule deer that can weigh up to 300 lbs.

As Kim pointed out this morning, here in Colorado, a deer guard is a good idea, because it will protect the truck and knock the deer out of the way. However, back in Park City, a deer guard is just a device that will pick the moose up and redirect it into your windshield – not a great idea.

I’m going to Durango next Wednesday, and that’s when I’ll get this thing installed. This will be my first followup appointment after surgery; I’m hoping that they say good things. I’d really, really like to get off of the meds that they have me on – the one that makes me bleed easily (to prevent blod clots) and the one that keeps my heart rate down (I think that’s to prevent my AFib from causing a stroke). I want to run. Now, my running days may be over. But at least I have to try.

I am going to Bayfield today for the dentist – they’re finishing up the second root canal that happened as a result of some abscess in my jaw. Hope I don’t hit any deer.

I’m just in from taking Juneau for another long walk over in Coyote Hill. It’s amazing, how walking a couple of miles leaves me rather tired. I am probably through doing that, because starting tomorrow, I’m allowed to actually start working out again. Wednesday is a swim day for me, but the cardio nurse has asked me to not submerge these puncture sites yet, so I’ll just do an aerobic bike ride, then try to do my normal Thursday working the next day.

I hope I can do that. I hope things haven’t gone too far downhill.

Okay, I’m going to go stare at Ethel until she makes me some breakfast 🙂

It’s Starting

…and stopping.

Here’s the base Webcam at Wolf Creek a few days ago –

…but now that snow has melted already, and there’s nothing new. They were blowing just after this, but then they stopped. It’s just too warm to keep snow on the ground.

Now, Keystone and Arapahoe Basin are competing – A Basin said that they were opening this Sunday with one run, so then Keystone announced that they would open at 3 PM on Saturday, just to get bragging rights 🙂 Last year, Wolf Creek opened first – but that was last year. This year, it’s not looking good early. There’s nothing in the forecast.

Last Thursday, I got my flu and RSV shots. I’ve never had any real reaction to those shots, but this year I did. It felt like I had the flu for about 36 hours. I came out of it enough to function, but wasn’t up to normal. This morning, however, I felt great, so I went and did my Tuesday morning workout – VO2Max bike, half hour ellip and core work. Yes, it’s Monday, but tomorrow morning early we leave for Colorado Springs so that the doctors can diddle in my cardiac spaces. They’re opening up the veins on both sides of my groin to send up two catheters – I understand that one of them is video, and the other one is the one that will actually do the burning in the pulse area of my heart to shut down the wayward nerves causing my AFib.

Tomorrow I just get there in time for a cardiac CT, and then go in early on Wednesday morning to get the actual procedure. I met a lady yesterday at church who had this procedure done three times, and it never worked, and now she has a pacemaker. That wasn’t encouraging. But….well,, the truth is that I’m going to go ahead and take the chance, so no sense pretending that there’s still any decision to be made.

Now, the list of possible side effects is as long as any ad for any medication on TV – where the announcer’s voice is listing all of the possible catastrophes while the video of the commercial shows the patients cavorting and singing and grinning – and that list ends with just plain ol’ “death”. Well, I’m well insured.

If everything goes okay, though, I stay in the Springs on Wednesday night as well, and then we drive home on Thursday. And it’s a beautiful week for a road trip. Colorado, in late October. Wow.

Too Tired For This *&^%!

We just got back from Leadville.

On Tuesday, we climbed Mount Elbert, the highest peak in Colorado.

That was really dumb.

It was 4500 feet, up and down, and about 10 miles distance. It was a lot of work. Of course, there was some satisfaction with being at the summit, the highest point in Colorado. But then we had to go downhill. And that hurt.

I somehow tweaked my knee on the way up, so, going down, I sort of changed my gait a little. Now it’s two days later, and it feels like I did a squats workout for five hours going downhill. I’m having trouble walking, and my quads hurt.

Leadville is a very funky town. It’s the highest incorporated city in the US, and the architecture all seems to be late 1800s. It’s a cool place. I could live there, except they have very few meetings and no real gym or lap pool.

But the mountains! Driving up 285 N, as soon as you pass Salida, you are being watched by giants. GIANTS. The mountains here around Pagosa are very pretty and pointy, with a lot of features and faces.

The mountains up there are GIANTS. They are huge looming presences They are huge, they are in your face, and they don’t really care about you or anything.

And they have so much, so much, area above treeline. I can’t even talk about it and make it make sense. Look at the above photo – notice how you see nothing but bare rock, all around? That’s the way it is. The mountains are huge, looming….never mind. Go there yourself.

So on Tuesday, we took a total of eleven hours, elapsed, going up and down. It should have taken less time, but we were being careful, because Ethel’s knee had really acted up. It took all day long, and still left me so tired that I couldn’t see straight.

The next day, we drove to Mount Sheridan, over in the Mosquito range, which is a much easier 14er – but Ethel’s knee was again bothering her, so we turned around a thousand feet below the summit and came back down.

Now, if you’re like me, you’re wondering, “Gee, Ethel’s knee is in that kind of shape, and yet you’re going to start climbing Kilimanjaro a week from Sunday? Is that smart? Does that make sense?”

Don’t bother asking the question. Her answers won’t satisfy you. But they seem to satisfy her.

She’s going to the doctor in about an hour to do….something or other. I have no idea. She seems to think that she can find the right combination of prescriptions that will allow her to hike for nine days, while climbing and descending 14,000 feet (we start and end the climb at about 5,300 feet). And maybe she can. Or maybe she’s just willing to endure the pain; she might not have been willing to endure it yesterday, because that might have affected her chanced of getting to the top of Kilimanjaro.

I will say this – I don’t want to go to Africa and climb Kilimanjaro. I’m tired, and it hurts to walk. I’m so tired that I am questioning all my life choices. But that’s the way that I react to fatigue. I didn’t react that while while I was climbing on Tuesday. But I did, starting yesterday.

And I’m glad to be back down in the San Juan Mountains, where the mountains aren’t sneering at me.

Roll Tide, sort of

Today is the first Alabama game of the season.

Meanwhile, yesterday, we did ten miles, up and down West Fork Canyon, crossing over the west fork of the San Juan River several times.

So I did 4000 feet of climbing on Wednesday, 8 miles of laps on Lobo Overlook above 11,000 feet on Thursday, and about 1600 feet of climbing with ten miles of hiking yesterday. I need smarter hobbies.

I think that we need to be do more camping, both to get used to sleeping in a bag in a tent, and sleeping at high elevation. Ethel keeps hemming and hawing about that. That’s probably going to come back and bite us. I don’t think that training will do much good if we’re not sleeping between hikes on Kilimanjaro, but….but she has her own way of thinking.

Well, if we don’t make it to the summit, it still was an adventure.

Meanwhile, it’s Saturday on Labor Day Weekend, which means a lot of football. I can’t really bring myself to care, but Ethel is all caught up in it. so there’s nothing for me to do but play along. She’s simply not going to pull herself away from the television all day today. She’s made that clear.

When NIL started, and the Transfer Portal became such a big deal, I stopped really caring about football. Now, I watched the Auburn game last night, and cheered and griped – but, then, I watch movies. While the movie is on, I care about what’s going on, but when it’s over, who cares?

I could just as easily not watch football today at all, and go do something else. But I am married, so I might as well relax – today, and almost every Saturday until after Thanksgiving, is a total loss. Relax and don’t fight it. Try to make the best of it.

She even has company coming over today to watch the Alabama game. Okay, I’ll be nice.

Yesterday, during that almost six hours of hiking, I learned that my rain jacket isn’t breathable and can be too warm. So, I need to do something about that. Lord knows we’ve spent a lot of money on this Kilimanjaro trip already, but apparently we haven’t spent enough. This morning, we’re going to the downtown Saturday morning meeting, instead of the evening Saturday meeting (see above re: Ethel’s football preoccupation) so afterwards I may go past the downtown outdoor shop and see what’s on Labor Day clearance, Clarence.

My psoas has been acting up, so I need to start doing more stretching there. Again, Kilimanjaro.

A month from now, we’ll have our lives back, and probably be almost recovered from the jet lag. It’s been my experience that jet lag from going west is much worse than jet lag from going east – although the last time we really had jet lag was the Iceland trip, which was six years ago, so now we’re considerably older. Everything gets worse the older you get.

Okay, now I get up and start cleaning house, to prepare for our company whom I don’t know, who are coming over to watch and Alabama game that I could just as easily miss. But this is what God ordained for today, so it must be what’s best for me.

And it must be God’s will, because it sure ain’t mine 🙂

Cinematic Whiplash

So, we’re still training, and – since we’re too tired to do anything else – Ethel is still bringing movies downstairs: two at a time, unknown to me, with the only stipulation being that we hadn’t watching them in a long time.

Yesterday we finished up “Primal Fear”, which is an amazing courtroom drama with Richard Gere and Ed Norton – very, very tense and engrossing. Then, a little while after we finished that, she put in – “Mamma Mia”.

I remember thinking – “Oh, boy. We’re watching a movie based on ABBA lyrics. There goes my IQ and standardized test scores”. But I have to be honest – it was a lot of fun. No, really – a lot of fun. And it’s amazing how well Meryl Streep can sing.

Today’s workout was at the gym – I did two hours on the treadmill at 15% grade to get right at 2700 feet of climbing, and then hit the Stairmaster for 122+ floors to make it 4000 feet of climb in total. That’s the equivalent as the hardest day that we’ll do at Kilimanjaro – except, when we climb those 4000 feet, they’ll be going from 15,300 to 19,300. That’s not really the same thing.

Other than that – I did a couple of hours of sponsorship today, and took a nap. That’s about it. Nothing else, really.

Now we’re watching “Clean and Sober”, which I’m sure that we haven’t seen in something like 20 years. Michael Keaton is still a sleazeball, and if that’s the way that they work the Steps in Philadelphia, then I’m amazed that anybody gets sober.

But, even so, compared to the meetings that we attended in Manhattan, those Philly folks are as solid as the first 100.

Tomorrow we’re going to do something up at elevation – it’s all up to Ethel at this point. We might take the dog – she was in a lot of pain a few days ago with tight muscles, but the vet gave her acupuncture, and now she’s moving like a puppy.