Spring Break 2005
Another year's spring break has come and gone. This year I spent the week in the Medicine Bow range just north of Rocky Mountain National Park. Nine of us from Berean spent five days and nights in tents and yurts in the area. Some highlights of the trip include:-Experiencing the best weather I've ever seen in the mountains during the winter. We hiked in on fresh powder that had fallen the night before we got there and had perfectly clear weather for the next three days.
-Discovering that Sigur Ros is the perfect music by which to appreciate the winter mountain landscape. The album "()" played while the fresh powder softly crunched beneath my snowshoes and I gawked at windswept peaks with their intimidating cornices. Something about the sonic space that Sigur Ros creates fit perfectly with the vast stretches of untouched
powder and snow-dusted pines. I also discovered that Muse, Interpol, and Thievery Corporation make the best motivational music when you're dead-tired of hauling your pack up steep inclines.-Building a quarter-mile long sled run down one of the trails. The run took a couple sharp turns, where we built up snowbanks in order to make the turns. As I flew down the trail luge-style on my back in the sled, careening up the bank and barely making the first sharp turn, it occurred to me that I was racing down the best sled run I'd ever been on.
-Watching Grant hit the first banked turn on a test run, fly off the sled, and land face-first into the snow, narrowly missing a stand of pine trees.
-Learning the luxuries of yurt camping. The first night some of us spent in tents at a high camp in order to get on the ridge the next day. However, the next four nights were spent in yurts, stationary tents that are more like cabins, equipped with propane stoves, bunk beds, and a fireplace.
-Having wonderful meals of pasta with shrimp in a garlic cheese sauce and another of beef with fresh vegetables and mushrooms. Quite an improvement over the usual fare of Clif bars and freeze-dried backpacking dinners.
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