Tebowing while Ski Hutting, 2012

 Greg, Joe and I skied in to a mountain hut by Ridgway on New Year's 2012 and did some tebowing!  We didn't know the outcome of the Broncos game.  Guess we didn't tebow hard enough! :(  Maybe it'll be applied to the playoffs.

The ski trip (10 mi. round trip) was kind of grueling.  We (I) didn't know the trail was open to snowmobiles, which had packed the snow to icy concrete.  We could have walked in (and at times wished we had)! 

Greg is still learning the ropes of cross-country skiing, so the downhill coming out was a bit of a chore as well.  When you fall on ice with a 30-pound backpack, it hurts, and then it's a bugger getting up!  Here's Greg with Mt. Sneffels (14,150 ft.) in the background:

 The San Juan Hut System is privately owned on Forest Service land, but all the huts can be accessed via roads, so they are not "wilderness" huts.

 

Water is supplied by Mother Nature and melted on the wood stove 

Greg filling the water tank with "fuel."

 

Wood is also supplied by Mother Nature and split, in our case, by Joe "Paul Bunyan" Schwarz.

We hoped to ski to a ridge overlooking Ouray, but instead, we only got Grand Mesa to the north.

The entire 5 mile trail was packed solid by snowmobiles.  The snow was only 18" at 10,000 feet, but would have been adequate for skiing except for the machines, sigh.  They flattened the entire width of the road, leaving no space for ski tracks.  Good thing we had skins, or we would have been hiking the last 1.5 miles.

Joe did much better than Kurt & Greg, thanks to his telemark skis and boots, but he did a nice faceplant at the end of this downhill run!

 Animal tracks heading straight through the fence.

Somebody spent a pile of money putting up miles of welded wire panel fencing.  Cimmaron mountains ring the horizon, and the point in the center is Wetterhorn (14,015 ft.)

Hey!  Radiodog is one of my email addresses!  :)

Rooms with a view.  And a windmill.

Tebowing, sans hats.