Last Day--Back To Breckenridge

A few of us went back to town for more shopping--mainly grabbing stuff we should have bought two days earlier--and to scout the menu at the restaurant we were going to that night. (It was fancy and great).

I brought the Sony F828 with me this time, as it was a clear sunny day that would be perfect for infrared-only black and white photography.

A terrific time was had by all. 

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.

Breckenridge Colorado

We finally made it into Breck on the 2nd full day there. Mostly shopping and feasting our eyes on what a lovely little town it is. I shot a bunch of selfies alone and in groups using my selfie stick, and while they are all incredible works of art, that's not what I planned on posting here.

During a short period of blue skies, while waiting for my girls to exit a T-shirt shop, I used my phone to grab this view between two buildings:

Again, we waited for the gondolas to stop charging $$$ and took a ride up the mountain.
Right into hell.
Something like 9000 kids were up there skiing and 'boarding, and it was freaking cold.
Apparently I chose an inferior quad of socks, because before long my toes lost all feeling.
The weather was crappier than at any other time during the whole trip, so no photos were taken.
We ended up in a bar eating and drinking, then headed back down.

Next up: It gets much better.

Day 2: Vail

A couple of people wanted to ski in Vail, and the rest of us were more than happy to hang out at the bottom of the mountain drinking and eating on the patio at Garfunkel's.

After many hours I got bored (the only sober one) and took Sylvia on a walk down a trail that looked promising. Brought the Sony F828, for the first real photo expedition since arriving in Colorado.
A few laced gummi bears also marked the first time I've tried to do any "serious" photography with a buzz on.

The bridge was actually well-traveled by every skier who came down the trails and wanted to take the gondola back up.
The fenced field photo is a personal favorite, but won't rate printing because of all the footprints in the snow.
Imagine it with a clean pristine coating of smooth new snow.

At 3:30pm they stop charging too much $$ for the gondola, so we finally went up to the top.
Unlike down in town, it was biting freaking cold with a windchill factor of holy crap.
I was able to tolerate photography for less than 10 minutes, then went inside the lodge to warm up before riding back down.
Skiers must be hardcore to put up with open chair lifts at altitude.


After a few hours dicking around in bars, shops, etc, it was time to cross the mountains on an hour+ drive back to home base in Breckenridge.
As the only sober member of our party--with bonus points for years of experience driving in upstate NY during winter--I was soon tapped to take over.
Within minutes it started to snow heavily with serious winds. Conditions went from "dark" to "OMG 30mph is way too fast". Got some brownie points for keeping my cool in a bad situation, and also for putting up with the panic of seriously baked passengers with grace. Our rented 2016 Lincoln Navigator with 4-wheel drive was the right tool for the job, and I fell in love with it.
Used most of our "Squirty-Juice", AKA windshield washer fluid.
The convenient stores in CO have that stuff right out front on pallets, because it's as critical as gasoline for getting around.

Went shopping for groceries, back to the rental house, and got myself rather well fucked up.

Views Of Colorado

Vacation fun in the Rocky Mountains!
Flew direct SA to Denver, with only one bit of drama after we landed involving a co-conspirator.
It was snowing at sunrise when we went to get our rental SUVs (4-wheel drive was mandatory to get to our rental house) and continued off and on for the rest of the day. After a hearty breakfast, we went shopping for legal intoxicants and food.
Over some mountains to Breckenridge took an hour+, then we settled-in to a beautiful 3-story house with all the amenities.

This is a look at the home next door from the kitchen table, which I claimed as my personal "office".
It gives you an idea of how we were living.

The view from our rear deck. The town of Breckenridge is at the bottom less than a mile to the left.

The snow came up to our bedroom windows on the sunken bottom floor.

This was only my second time in Colorado--the first being in 1987 when my late brother Ken and I went to fly large and dangerous "model" rockets on a high plateau near Hartsell. We became a bit famous on that trip in large part because the hobby was still small and new and we brought high standards of theory, design, construction and finishing to our rockets. It didn't hurt that Ken was a biker and I was a rocker, and we looked it and partied as hard as expected.  
This time the altitude didn't affect me much, possibly because I stay better hydrated these days and also because I spent the first day going up and down stairs as often as possible to speed acclimation.

More to come.

Trout Creek

While uploading a pic to Flickr I decided to play with their map feature, and ended up discovering that these next photos are from Trout Creek, not Cold Creek as I originally thought. Cold Creek crosses the main road nearby so I just assumed...

It's right across the street from our rental house (and down a steep pine needley hill) and I discovered it the very first day in Tahoe.
The next afternoon while the girls napped after snowmobiling I put on my tactical boots and grabbed the Sony F828 infrared camera and a monopod. This was an excellent choice, although it just occurred to me that I never went back with the Alpha 200 and a selection of lenses to shoot it in color.
Oh well, never going back so it's water under the bridge.


Just now I've been experimenting here with PhotoShop infrared to black & white conversion techniques, so results may be a little scattered.

This was one I edited on the laptop right after shooting it. Don't remember why I allowed some false color to remain.









Like anywhere you go, there was plenty of boring, uninspiring, and downright ugly views in the Lake Tahoe area.
Right near downtown there was a nasty old van in the corner of a parking lot trapped by berms of dirty snow that I meant to shoot at some point, but now I'm glad I didn't.
It was an incredibly beautiful place for the most part and I hope some of my pictures did it justice.

Snowmobiles Rock!

Up early on our first morning in South Lake Tahoe California, we drove just a few miles to Lake Tahoe Adventures and paid money, signed forms, fitted helmets, and grabbed goggles for our snowmobile tour.
Other groups soon arrived, and before long we loaded up the bus and hit the road for Hope Valley in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, which is the biggest in the USA outside Alaska.

I only brought my phone for pics because I didn't want to deal with anything bigger--my cameras are very large and heavy. In hindsight, adding Sylvia's Sony T70 would have been the smartest move, giving me a zoom lens and more pixels for printing. Oh well...what I got certainly tells the story, and the quality is better than I expected.

The bus stopped here while the gate to Hope Valley is opened:


So far sightings of snow are confined to small patches in the shade, with almost none at lower elevations. I'm a little concerned at this point as we've been driving uphill for awhile.
Then we drove uphill a bunch more, and conditions start to look better.

We meet Danny, our instructor/guide, and learn about our machines.
He proves to be funny, quick-witted, and super nice.
All four of my girls have a crush on him already, and to be honest I'm a bit smitten myself since he's one of the few men I've ever met who might actually be cooler and more interesting than me.
After about five minutes of instruction we're ready for a quick run up the road so Danny can get a feel for our abilities and establish a logical order so we'd have the best chance of staying together without anyone running up someone else's rear.
At this point we've stopped for a quick shuffle of the lineup, a peptalk, and a little more instruction:

After running on some recently added snow and a few bare patches of asphalt the trail ahead is looking much better.

Time to open them up and start having fun!
Wish I had some action shots.

This first leg of the tour was a blur for me due to extreme concentration on mastering the snowmobile, but the beauty of our surroundings still gets through as we blast up steep mountain roads covered in snow. After I don't know how long, we finally come to the first break in a most scenic location:


Danny gets the photo credit on both of these, with style points for dropping onto his side and shooting this next one from the ground like some kind of pro-with-a-phonecam:

(I had to rotate them 180* in Photoshop cuz he had my phone upside-down--not so cool now, are ya?)

We've reached a pretty serious elevation by now, and this is the view ahead:

I made yellow snow behind the trees on the right. Been over 30 years since I've done that.

Looking back from here, this caught my eye:

Obviously the snow is freaking DEEP up here!
And these signs are 3 feet taller than the ones here in Texas.



From the next rest stop:








Sylvia and I have agreed that we want to play like this again.
Texas being what it is, probably jet-skies and ATVs are next.

Blizzard 2011

I finally got to take some pictures of snow tonight!
After listening to the TV weatherjerk warnings all week, things would have gotten ugly if the promise of snow had failed to materialize.
I even put one of the band lights on our patio so we could easily check for progress during the Spurs/Lakers game. (NICE tip-in for the win, McDyess!)

The obligatory 'snow on vehicle' shot favored by most South Texans:
Some decent accumulation here--the streets and roofs are solid white.
It might look like dusk, but I shot this at 2:04AM.

Snow be coming down and shit:


The edge of our patio has a nice layer, but unless the grass and leaves are completely covered this weather event is best described as a 'light dusting'.
Freezing rain and sleet earlier tonight closed all our highways, because apparently nobody around here knows how to drive.


This is the "snowstorm" that gave me a chance to take some pics:
I find it hard to believe that there will be school closings tomorrow, but then I'm jaded from growing up in the middle of New York State. School closings were rare and wonderful things, but it took at least a foot dumped between 4 and 6AM for the snowplows and salt/sand trucks to get far enough behind that the buses couldn't cope.

The chilly temps for 3 days has been a bigger issue, what with freezing water pipes and such. I got it all under control pretty quick, so we're all good.
Not looking forward to hauling the band gear in and out of the club tomorrow night, but it's the LAST show for BLISS so there's no way around it.
Y'all should come out if you can--it's going to be the most insane rock show in a small club EVER!

ReTox Bar, On Patricia @ West Ave.