Snowmobiles Over The Continental Divide

Finally, the big day!!
We had made a reservation with Good Times Adventures for a two hour tour, and luckily this day featured the very best weather of our entire vacation.
Cold as hell (10 below zero?) but sunny and clear with lots of fresh snow to make everything pretty.

I decided that their loaner boots were better than mine, but all the rest of my gear was fine. Turned out that the heated footwells on our machines made it a moot point.

Now for some contrast:

 This is what the pair of us rode in March 2013 on our Lake Tahoe trip. Terrific fun, but...

 For 2016 we each had our own one of these.
Won't bore you with the specs, but wow! And they were brand new.
Also, because this was Colorado and not California, the throttle didn't have a difficult to operate weasel-lawyer "safety" device that sucked all the fun out of it and sapped your concentration. California sucks, by the way.


One early favorite part of this tour was that after a familiarization cruise through the woods, we got to a big open field with what can only be described as an oval track. Some of the others didn't quite get it, but me and Lisa sure did. I wound that sucker up and flew, passing on the inside and outside a few times and grinning ear to eel. Pretty sure that had the track been bigger I could have hit 60mph or more.
What a rush!
Time for a quick selfie.

Then it was time to get into the meat of the tour--onward and upward to the Continental Divide!

Single file up, sometimes on impossibly narrow trails through the pines, and God was it beautiful!
The sections on roads or across fields were also fun, because you could gawk without getting croaked.
(BTW, our guide was Ivan from Argentina, and he knows almost as much about Ginobili as we do, being their national hero and all).



Up, up, up we went, until the trail spit us out into another world, at around 12,500 feet above sea level .
This is Mt. Guyot, and the slope to the left drains springtime snowmelt waters to the west, while a few meters to the right etc etc. (When I peed behind a tree, I made sure to be on OUR side. California got enough of my whiz on the Tahoe trip).

To me, the divide was more moving than some invisible thing like a border or the equator. After climbing a mountain range, it's very stirring to see and know that everything really does change. Much like the Mississippi River which I've crossed MANY times, or reaching another continent separated by an ocean.
It was a big event in my life--thinking about how it must have felt to all the pioneers hundreds of years ago.


We got to spend a decent amount of time up there--enough for my aforementioned whiz, where I sank into the snow up to my junk and had a vision of needing help to get out--and for pictures and videos.

Remembering photo tips from many years ago, I was glad I had set my phone's camera to +1.5 EV overexposure, because this is almost exactly how I remember it looked up there.


Our trip down was every bit as much fun as the way up.



The scenery was beautiful and my heart was soaring.
One of the very best days of my entire life.

What I Got For Christmas

(Besides tragedy, the resulting outpouring of love and hugs, and tons of distasteful tasks to accomplish, of course.)


I got gift cards, which are awesome for people like me.
What I thought I wanted was a scope for my Mauser project and a harddrive to fix my PC, but I realized that those items can wait compared to more pressing concerns.

While I don't make New Year's Resolutions, I've been planning on giving up smoking for awhile. Not only has it gotten extremely inconvenient, expensive, and just plain gross, I also decided after my brother's recent health problems that getting very old is a worthy goal. Especially when you're the last of your family.

So on January first I bought a pair of vaporizers, with one shown on the left:

I'm sure to go into depth on this later, but the main point is to stop inhaling proven evil ASAP and worry about quitting nicotine at a later date. So far, so good.


On the right is the little camera that arrived today in a BIG box.
While surfing WalMart's website I stumbled upon this tiny Vivitar 787HD.

While on our trip to Lake Tahoe last March, I found myself wishing I owned or had borrowed a GoPro Hero, especially when we went snowmobiling. GoPro pretty much owns the HD Action Camcorder category, and deservedly so. But they are expensive, especially for someone like me who isn't sporty very often.
The Vivitar usually comes with the waterproof housing and a wireless remote plus a couple of basic mounting options, but WalMart had it in a bundle with every mounting option possible for a ridiculously low price. It shoots full 1080p HD video at 30fps and 12mp stills.
It's never going to compete with GoPro for hard serious usage, but if it lasts through our next trip I'll consider it a success.

There's no way I was going to risk my phone or the F828 to shoot video while riding a jetski or zipline, but this little thing can do the job and the whole bundle was about 1/8th what a GoPro costs before you start adding mounting hardware.

And it's always fun to play with a new camera, and update media player codecs while you're at it.