Thursday, February 1, 2001                                                         Crested Butte, CO

After fighting with the frozen drainpipes for the waste tanks, we finally got under way.  Even though I had electric heat tape on one of the pipes, I still had trouble with the gate valves freezing.  After steadily pouring nearly a gallon of hot water on the grey water valve, I was able to loosen the gate enough to drain the tank.  The black water tank could wait for warmer weather.

We headed south from Buena Vista through the valley toward Salida with the Collegiate range to our right.  Near Salida we turned west onto US 50 and began our climb over 11,000 ft Monarch Pass.  The long steep grade left us with a slow but steady pace at 30 mph in 2^nd gear.  Everything went well even as it began snowing near the pass.  Christine was far more uncomfortable with the ride down the other side, but all went well.

We pulled into Gunnison about a half hour early to pick up a skiing friend, Nancy, at the Gunnison airport.  With the extra time we searched out a way to clean our RV.  The snow, slush, sand, and salt of the past week had left the Fun Mover looking very grungy.

We lucked out and found a self-serve winterized car wash.  The bays were just big enough to pull the RV into.  The cement floors of the bay were heated to prevent ice build-up. And the water coming out of the spray nozzle was very hot.  Even with these helpful attributes, cleaning the RV when it’s only ten degrees out proved to be a challenge.  The foam suds would freeze to the sides of the RV before they could cut through much grime.  Eventually the high-pressure hot rinse was the best tool.  And the bright sun was a big help with the final drying (thawing).

We picked up Nancy on time, and enjoyed a fun lunch in Gunnison before driving 30 miles north to Mt. Crested Butte.  We easily checked into our condo at Crested Butte lodge and parked the RV with an electrical connection to run a space heater inside, just to keep the pipes from freezing.

Friday, February 2, 2001                                                            Crested Butte, CO

It was a beautifully clear day as the three of us took in our first day of skiing for the season.  The mountain had not seen much new snow in the past week, so the slopes were all very well groomed.  This suited us well for our first day of skiing.  Christine’s new boots not only proved to be comfortable, but she was skiing great on her first day.  My new boots also exhibited promising skill-improving characteristics, but fell far short on the comfort scale.  I’m hoping strongly that my boots provide an appreciable improvement in comfort after a few days of breaking them in.

After a great first day on the slopes, we returned to our room to find that the rest of our party had arrived from Atlanta.  Harlan, Jackie, Mike and Mike all came in today for a skiing weekend.  Christine and I know three of these guys from years of me motorcycling with them.  We’ll ski two days with them before they head up to Irwin Lodge for some backcountry skiing.

We all enjoyed a little après ski in our condo with our well-stocked fridge before soaking in the hot tub and cleaning up for dinner in town.  The town of Crested Butte is a short three-mile shuttle ride down from the mountain resort.  We all enjoyed an excellent dinner at the local brewery.  

 

1) Jackie, Mike, Christine, Joe, Mike, Harlan and Nancy 2) Joe follows the guys.

Saturday, February 3, 2001                                                          Crested Butte, CO

Day two of skiing was very hard for me. My feet were very disappointed with a second day in my new boots.  We had moderate snowfall throughout the day, which kept a very flat light on the slopes making it difficult to see much contour.  I started the day very slowly, but finally found my groove in the afternoon skiing more challenging terrain with the two Mikes.

We again finished the ski day with après ski in our room and a soak in the hot tub.  Then back into town for an excellent Italian dinner.

Sunday, February 4, 2001                                                                  Crested Butte, CO

Day three of skiing had me unsuccessfully experimenting with different ways to provide more comfort in my boots.  All attempts failed.  The whole group met for lunch and pictures on the mountain.  After that I went up to the top of the mountain and skied down the Head Wall double black diamond run, twice, with some of the other guys.  These two runs involved wipeouts that resulted in the inevitable death of the toenails on the big toe of each foot.  Otherwise I felt very satisfied with my skiing.

Christine has been enjoying her skiing very much.  Today finally sent her knees over the edge, though.  Her old high school basketball injuries always crop up in these types of rigorous play.  She was pleased that she got three full days in before her knee swelled up.  Note from Christine:  It is also interesting that the top of my left foot became numb at this point and is still numb a month later.

We said goodbye to the men visiting us, as they caught their shuttle up to Irwin Lodge for some backcountry skiing.  We’ll see all them again on Wednesday.  Nancy, Christine and I stayed in for the evening with pizza delivery.

Monday, February 5, 2001                                                                Crested Butte, CO

Christine took the day off and gave her knees a rest.  Nancy and I enjoyed a half-day of skiing, except for when we collided into each other.  Trying to talk and ski at the same time is a dangerous experiment in multi-tasking.  Nancy ended up dislocating her shoulder, but otherwise bounced right back.  We both called it quits around lunch and hooked up with Christine before heading into town for an afternoon of window-shopping.

We had a blast in Crested Butte moseying around the shops and talking to the locals.  We learned quite a bit about local lore and the pace of development in the area.  Of particular interest were all the references to The Red Lady.  We learned that The Red Lady was a local reference to Mt Emmons, looming over the town to the west.  Allegedly a lady is visible on the mountain when looking at it from a particular vantage point with the sun at the right angle.  And according to critics, the viewer needs to be properly inebriated to recognize the vision.  Regardless, The Red Lady has attached her handle to many brands in the town.  Not the least disappointing is The Red Lady Ale at the local brewery.

After a great Mexican lunch our shopping included ice cream and chocolates, and finally a return visit to the Crested Butte Brewery at the Idle Spur Restaurant.  We hadn’t planned a long visit; just a brief stay to sample some other flavors.  Seventeen pints later we had polished off two appetizers and three entrees while making friends with some men at the bar.  Nancy and Christine mostly enjoyed their wheat beer garnished with a lemon while I found their ales more to my liking.  I enjoyed the Scottish Ale, but really settled into a happy groove with White Buffalo Peace Ale.  This is yet another beer with a local reference.  There is a ranch outside of town with a rare white buffalo amongst the herd.  Regardless of the selection of beer, we all had so much fun on our last night with Nancy.

The White Buffalo!

Tuesday, February 06, 2001                                                                 Gunnison, CO

We forced ourselves up and at ‘em to get packed and checked out.  We enjoyed one last meal with Nancy at the Paradise Café in Crested Butte before heading back to Gunnison to drop her off at the airport.

Christine and I gladly returned to RV living as she did laundry and I performed some maintenance on the RV.  We ended up in the Gunnison library for some internet surfing before checking into a ‘nearly closed for the season’ campground.  We’re now both enjoying the twilight hour working at our computers in the RV while looking across the half-frozen Gunnison River in our snow-white campground.  Life has been very good.

As we watched temperatures sit above freezing today, we toyed with planning to get the motorcycles out tomorrow.  We’ll just have to see if the weather cooperates.

Wednesday, February 7, 2001                                                 Crested Butte, CO

We spent another day in Gunnison.  We visited the library at Western State University to surf the internet a little more quickly. And then we parked in the local Wal-Mart parking lot to get the bikes off for a ride.  The weather was really cooperating, however the RV was not.

I could not get the ramp to come down at the back of the RV to unload the bikes.  After about an hour or so of troubleshooting and dissection I was able to find a corroded wire that needed to be re-spliced.  Feeling triumphant in my discovery, I quickly made the repair and successfully lowered the ramp.  But the trouble was not over.  With the ramp now down, I could not get it to go back up.  I spent another hour under the RV unsuccessfully hunting for yet another severed wire, but found nothing.

Not wanting to get stuck in the Wal-Mart parking lot overnight with the ramp down, I began calling around for help.  I finally reached a towing service that felt confident that they could at least raise the ramp, so they came over and in short time found a bypass circuit that raised the ramp.  However, they were not good troubleshooters and couldn’t offer much advice as to why the ramp wouldn’t operate properly.

With our motorcycling plans squelched for the day we headed back up to Crested Butte to meet up with the guys coming back from Irwin Lodge.  We checked into our room in the Old Town Inn in the town of Crested Butte just before the shuttle dropped the guys off.  We shared our suite with Harlan and Jackie; the two Mikes had their own room.  We walked over to an Asian restaurant for a nice spicy meal in the cold evening.

I need to write some words about the reason that the wire corroded and severed, rendering the ramp inoperable.  The undercarriage of the RV is wide open with all the mechanical lines fairly exposed along the frame where they are attached.  This includes electrical, hydraulic, propane, and fuel lines.  This would not be a concern were it not for all this winter travel in snowy conditions.  The exposed lines and structure under the RV make ideal attachment points for all the snow, slush and ice that are thrown up by the tires.  We end up carrying a lot of extra weight with the ice build-up suspended from the undercarriage.

This weight ends up tugging on the lines and stressing them.  The first failure resulting from the condition was when the driver side taillights went out in Denver.  At first I assumed a burnt out bulb until I realized that the taillights work in tandem, and that both were out.  I finally crawled under the RV to discover the signal wires for the taillights just dangling disconnected.  The weight of the accumulated ice had caused them to disconnect.

That same rear corner of the RV is also the location for all of the ramp wires and electronics.  These wires collectively create a lot of surface area on which the ice can adhere and accumulate.  Throw in the destructive powers of road salt and you create a stressful environment for any electronics.  I will have to come up with a remedy for this situation or I’ll be battling it as a chronic problem.

Thursday, February 8, 2001                                                              Crested Butte, CO

We awoke this morning to falling snow, and plenty of it.  There were nearly six fresh inches of powder on the ground with no sign of it letting up.  We were all very fired up.  Christine and I felt fresh having not skied the past two days.  I went out to check on the RV and get our skis out.  Everything looked good.  I hadn’t plugged the RV in, and was just letting it keep above freezing with the propane furnace and battery power.

We said goodbye to the two Mikes who were flying out today, and then hopped on the shuttle for the mountain.  We got up there shortly after nine and enjoyed skiing on some nice powder for the first few runs, but it was quickly skied into clumpy crud by mid morning.  Skiing on powder and crud is much more demanding physically because of the added resistance.  By mid afternoon we were pretty worn out.

We caught the shuttle back to town and enjoyed our last evening together beginning with a nice soak in the hot tub.  Christine picked up our first mail drop from Sioux Falls, and we enjoyed going through ten days worth of mail.  The four of us dressed for town and enjoyed a little shopping before dinner.  It was the end of a fantastic vacation with our friends.  At least their vacation was over, but ours was really just beginning.

Friday, February 9, 2001                                                                      Gunnison, CO

We packed up with Jackie and Harlan and headed back to Gunnison after breakfast to drop the guys off at the airport.  When I first stepped into the RV this morning I knew there was trouble.  It was eleven degrees inside the RV.  Apparently I had misjudged how long the furnace would run off of the coach’s battery power.  At some point the previous evening the battery had dropped below the point where it would ignite the furnace and run the blower.  From then on it was only a matter of time as the cold temperatures sapped the remaining heat from the RV.  Everything inside was completely frozen.

I immediately started up the RV engine and re-started the furnace to begin thawing things out and discover what damage the freezing caused.  Jackie had volunteered to help me trouble-shoot the problem I was having with getting the ramp to go up.  I had been thinking about the problem for the past day and thought I might now know the cause of the problem.  So I maneuvered the RV in the parking lot to permit the opening of the ramp.  I went ahead and opened it a bit, and then immediately was successful closing it.  I was right with my diagnosis.  I only kicked myself for not thinking of it Wednesday when we still had time to ride.

The reason that the ramp would not rise was that the ramp electronics already thought it was up.  There are automatic cut-off switches that turn the winch off when the ramp is both fully extended or fully closed.  I had not considered the possibility that the switch was stuck in the closed position, thus preventing the winch from working in that direction.  I was sucked into thinking that the reason that the ramp would not go up had something to do with why it wouldn’t at first go down.  My mind was trapped into searching for a similar cause.  As a puzzle-solver I try to keep my mind conditioned to approaching puzzles from many directions, thus I was disappointed in overlooking this now obvious cause for the ramp failure.  Oh well, I moved on.

We uneventfully dropped the guys off at the Gunnison Airport and then spent some time again at the University library on their high-speed internet connections.  We then did a little grocery shopping and picked up another video before returning to the same campsite we had used on Tuesday.  There we filled up the fresh water tank and began discovering the freeze damage.

The first freeze failure was the intake fitting on our toilet.  It had cracked and was spraying water across the bathroom floor when under pressure.  I had to disassemble the toilet to get to the fitting.  I ended up using the cracked fitting to block off the water supply to the toilet. I used a screw and lots of silicone to create a stop for the supply line.  After giving the silicone a couple hours to cure we were finally able to put the system under pressure. 

We ended up in the condition that frustrated us our first night in Sioux Falls.  The water lines buried in the floor between the bathroom and kitchen had frozen solid.  So the only water we had was the cold water out of the bathroom sink.  With that final insult we sat down for a great dinner salad and garlic bread.  Christine even whipped up some fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies with fresh fruit for desert.  We settled into our movie and called it a day.

Saturday, February 10, 2001                                                                        Golden, CO

We postponed our plans to ski Monarch today, and instead drove directly to Denver to hit Camping World before it closed so that I could make repairs to the toilet.  Also we needed to get the water lines thawed out which did not occur overnight in Gunnison with negative temperatures. Denver promised to be warmer.

Christine did all the driving today as we slowly went over a snow and ice covered Monarch pass.  The roads looked worse than they drove.  Christine handled it all very well as I caught up on some writing and reading.  We made it to Camping World by 3:00 and picked up the $15 part that I needed.  Fifteen minutes later our toilet was repaired.  And the warmer Denver climate had already thawed our pipes.  At this point it appears that no other damage was done.

We found the cleanest campground ever on the west side of Denver in Golden, CO.  That’s right, the home of Coors Brewery.  I sure hope they’re open for tours while we’re here.  We settled in for an evening of organizing as Christine braved an attempt at cooking a pork roast in our convection oven.  Other than it taking a lot longer to cook than it would have in a residential oven, it turned out very tasty.  Christine will have to experiment with a mix of higher cooking temperatures and longer cooking times.

We kicked back after dinner and watched some television as we enjoyed a peaceful warm evening with most systems functioning as they should.

Sunday, February 11, 2001                                                                            Golden, CO

We had a great morning just relaxing in bed and putzing around in the RV.  After fresh showers and lunch we drove back to the store in Denver where we purchased our ski equipment.  I dropped off my boots for a little fine-tuning of the fit. Next we took in our first movie theater feature with a matinee showing of Chocolat.  We both enjoyed it.

Tonight Christine braves another first by making pizza in the RV.  In the mean time we’re looking forward to taking in a couple Denver attractions over the next couple days.

Monday, February 12, 2001                                                                          Golden, CO

Another warming day near Denver encouraged some outside work.  I spent the morning under the RV on two important tasks.  I boxed in the rear driver side corner of the undercarriage to protect the exposed wires there that had been vulnerable to ice build-up.  I also added a section of electrical heat tape to the ‘Black Water’ drainpipe to permit draining under freezing conditions.  These two remedies should ease some of our harsh weather challenges.

Christine spent the morning catching up on laundry and doing some reading for school.  We were both ready after lunch to get out and do something.  I had it in mind to head into Denver to visit the Art Museum, but it’s closed on Mondays.  So the alternate plan was to partake in the tour of the Coors Brewery here in Golden.  It was quite a good tour, chock full of history.  This single brewery here in Golden is the largest in the world (Bet ya’ didn’t know dat !)  We capped off the tour with a nice meal in Golden.

Tuesday, February 13, 2001                                                                 Golden, CO

It was four weeks ago today that we closed on the sale of our house in Charlotte.  We’ve covered a lot of ground since then. 

I went to bed last night with an irritated left eye for the final time.  I figured that I had gotten something in my eye last Wednesday when I was underneath the RV trying to get the ramp working.  My eye has been irritated ever since.  I was hoping that it would work it out on its own, but as of last night I was at my limit.  I hopped out of bed early this morning to try to get an appointment with an ophthalmologist today.  I scored with a large practice right here in Golden.

The foreign body in my eye was one of my own eyelashes, buried so deep under the lid that it was completely out of my own view.  The extraction was quick and painless, and I was underway.

I dropped Christine off at the Main Public Library in downtown Denver to get some research done for her coursework.  Meanwhile I went back to get my ski boots that had been dropped off Sunday for some sizing adjustments.  Our running around ended with our final large purchase for a while.  We bought a digital camera to optimize the building of our website.

Christine is deeply under the weather in the grips of a severe cold that she thinks she caught skiing last week.  I hope the rest she gets will get her through the cold rapidly.  We are trying to get back into the mountains for some skiing tomorrow.

Wednesday, February 14, 2001                                                        Breckenridge, CO

We awoke in Denver with about five inches of fresh snow on the ground.  This encouraged us to cancel our plans of an early start up to the mountains and skiing today.  Instead we slept in and gave the highway crews time to clear the roads.  We headed out late in the morning west on I-70 and had a beautiful drive up into the snow covered mountains.  We reached our campground in Breckenridge in early afternoon and settled in for a couple of hours.

Christine had planned a nice Valentine’s Day dinner, but we both agreed to push that out a day, and instead go hang out in the town of Breckenridge and have dinner at the Breckenridge Brewery.  The campground is a short three miles to the town.  So we walked around and did a little window-shopping before ending up at the Brewery for a tasty dinner and some excellent ales.  I preferred the Avalanche Amber, but Christine settled into their Pale Ale.  We ended the evening with a few games of pool at a local pub.  Breckenridge too is very light on tourism traffic right now.  This really is a lull in the ski season as the resorts await the Spring-Break traffic.

Christine and I happened across an information booth promoting a special deal to ‘ski & stay’ in Breckenridge.  The catch is that we’ll have to sit through a 90-minute pitch on selling mountain condos.  I haven’t endured one of these kind of things for a long time, and don’t relish the thought.  But if we tolerate it in reason, then I expect that we’ll endure more of these pitches in the future, if the package warrants it.

Thursday, February 15, 2001                                                            Breckenridge, CO

We got our day started and drove the RV over to Copper Mountain ski area about twelve miles away.  They had a very efficient operation that included an express shuttle from their free parking area.  It was a pretty day to ski.  We used a 2-for-1 voucher that we picked up at a Wells Fargo Bank in Denver.

Christine’s cold was improving so we were able to enjoy ourselves nicely.  We brought our own food and water to reduce our spending on the mountain.  By afternoon we were both really skiing well as we worked on our form and did some skills drills.

We cruised on back to our campground for a meal and evening in.  We enjoyed a fine bottle of wine and died early exhausted from a day of skiing.  We were so tired that we even left all the dinner dished until morning.  Thanks for the wine Norm.

Continue on to February 16, 2001