Spring Skiing

Now that the days are beginning to lengthen and we are sliding toward spring, it's time to think about Spring Break and Spring Skiing.

No, I'm not talking about the "late season" conditions that involve plowing through a foot of mashed-potato snow. Powder hounds shouldn't despair: March is statistically the snowiest month in Colorado. But that snow frequently gives way to eye-popping blue skies that frame the snow-covered mountains so starkly you'd think God took a black magic marker to outline them.

Winter Park doesn't close until the third week of April, so you have plenty of time to get in some skiing during what traditionally have been the best conditions of the year.

And don't forget April--the second snowiest month! Admittedly, people from lower elevations find their thoughts turning toward golf and putting in a garden; in the high country, however, it's still a time for playing in the snow.

We hope you'll join us before it all starts to melt.

Deep Freeze in the Mountains and thoughts about winter

Recently I've been reading a novel set in early December along northern California's Mendocino coast. The setting is a gloomy one, with trees (including giant sequoias) dripping with rain. There is looming fog, dim, diffused light, and the general depressed air of a damp winter.

Meanwhile, people in a mansion overlooking the ocean are preparing a bright holiday celebration including chamber orchestras, bright oak-log fires, mulled wine and mead, and every sort of festal food. The contrast between the outside gloom and the bright firelight is striking.

Yesterday at the High Mountain Lodge, a bitter cold spell settled in, and I awoke early this morning before dawn to go over and check the pipes and the heating situation in the guest lodge. I was thinking about that novel. It was dark as pitch. The cold was bone chilling, and the snow that had fallen overnight actually squeaked when I walked on it.

We are tumbling toward the shortest and darkest day of the year in just a few weeks but aren't even there yet. I anxiously went through all our guest rooms, running hot water down every drain to make sure that the sewer line wouldn't freeze up. I know, I know--other cold places in the country worry about their pipes freezing; up here, we get anxious when the sewer ices up. They have even invented a machine to thaw out a sewer line. It's a cross between a power washer and a roto-rooter. You hook it up to your hot water tank....

But I digress.

After checking all the rooms for warmth, and making sure the utility chase between the first and second floor of the lodge was warm, with no icy blasts chilling the pipes, I squeaked my way back to the dining lodge and our owner's quarters, took a shower, and got dressed for the day.

When I next went outside the sun was up, and it smacked me in the face and dazzled me. The sky was so dark blue it was almost purple, and the snow on the mountains and down in the pasture was so amazingly bright that I thought of a 16th century poet's made-up word, "glistering," a combination of "glistening" and "blistering."

Of course, the temperature was nine below, but the sunlight was brighter and sharper than the warmest Caribbean beach.

So much for gloomy northern California contrasts between the indoors and outside. I guess you could call Colorado winters "postmodern" when it comes to the usual traditional and literary ideas of our darker months. A hundred years ago, when Christina Rosetti wrote, "In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan. Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone," she accurately described the condition of the earth and water. But there's nothing bleak about a Colorado winter.

Yes, we will have crackling fires in the fireplaces at the High Mountain Lodge this winter. Yes, we will have bright celebrations with good food and drink. There may be some overcast days, and the wind can blow like the Big Bad Wolf.

But outside the Lodge rooms and away from the crackling fires, there is a world of exquisite winter beauty. I hope you are lucky enough to experience it; it would be really cool if you experienced it with us (that's a shameless marketing plug).

Julie and I hope to see you this not-so-bleak winter.

Early Snows Promise Good Early Skiing

Don't let her "Poor Little Match Girl" look distract you. Murphy, the Lodge Dog, loves her some snow.

It started snowing for real up at the High Mountain Lodge in October. We have had five significant snowstorm (more than 6 inches) since then.

All indications point toward an amazing early ski season for Winter Park.

Generally, this time of year, skiers can expect--at best--one or perhaps two runs of man-made snow at the resort. However, if the trend we experienced in October continues (always a gamble), we may have some pretty decent skiing by Opening Day in just a couple of weeks.

And there's nothing to suggest that skiers and snowboarders who choose to upgrade that classic winter song to "I'm dreaming of a White Thanksgiving" will be disappointed.

Come join us for some early-season snow sports, and plan to spend Thanksgiving with us. Julie is making a traditional feast with all the trimmings (thank God for the three ovens in the High Mountain Lodge's kitchen). Details on our website.

The Raspberry Month

Recently we got a Facebook invitation from a new friend in the Fraser Valley who invited us to her secret raspberry hunting grounds.

Like Italian truffle hunters who take circuitous routes to disguise the location of their favorite spots, denizens of the Fraser Valley take their raspberries seriously.

Luckily for us, our secret raspberry patch is just below the dining room windows, and I have been watching it in the last few warmer days bloom with pecks--if not bushels--of ripe raspberries.

The plan is to include our own raspberries in the fruit we serve at breakfast at the Lodge for the rest of August and into September. Additionally, I hope to put up some jars of raspberry jam that we will serve to our guests this winter when snow drifts out of the west completely overwhelm the raspberry canes.

Our berries are smaller than the mutant giants we get at the grocery store, but they are oh-so-sweet. Be the envy of all your friends and come visit us during Raspberry Month.

First Snow of the Season!

I wouldn't exactly call it a "storm." It's been gently snowing on and off all day. No accumulation to speak of, but a lot of moisture has been soaking into our very thirsty ground.

I took the dogs for "walkies" earlier today. You would think that, with all the acreage we have around the High Mountain Lodge that the dogs could explore the place on their own, but noooo, they insist that we take them. You would think they'd been shut up in an urban apartment all day the way they go nuts when we put on outdoor boots--instead of being in the country in doggie paradise.

But anyway, walking along country roads and in the pasture in the snow was a delightful experience. The aspen leaves have all fallen, and you can smell the leaf mold on the wet ground. A Dan Fogleberg song from my adolescence begins, "The end of October, / the sleepy brown woods seem to / bow down their heads to the winter." That's sort of what it feels like today.

We're really slow right now, though reservations are starting to pile up for the winter ski season, as well as Thanksgiving. Winter Park opens on November 14. In the meantime, we are participating in a Professional Association of Innkeepers offering of two free nights to active military and veterans over the Veterans Day weekend. We filled up within 48 hours of posting the offering, and have a respectable wait list, as well.

Some friends whom I used to play in a bar-band with are coming up to provide entertainment for the weekend. Should be an awesome time.

While the summer activities are winding down and the winter ones have yet to gear up, there is plenty still to do in the mountains in the fall. Hikes, bike rides, fishing, golf. Shoot, all the merchants are having sales getting read to flop their inventory for the winter.

Good times in the mountains. Come visit.

Rain

Some of my earliest childhood memories are of smelling the moisture in the air after a rainstorm.

I grew up in the Oklahoma panhandle, where rainstorms were few and far between. However, most years around about the 4th of July, we would be treated to spectacular downpours, the product of cumulus clouds that would build and roil and form and churn about in the air above the high plains, then release torrents of water from the bottom of anvil-shaped monster-clouds, as well as not a little bit of hail, and occasionally a tornado or two.

But I always welcomed the rain--since I didn't have to worry about the hail denting the car or the tornado sucking the house away to Oz and perhaps, if you were lucky, dropping it on a politician: that's why God made fathers: to work to earn money to pay for the insurance.

The July storms were usually the first rain we'd had since spring, when after a dry winter we'd have maybe a week or two of gentle rains, and everybody would hurry out to Elmhurst Cemetery to harvest the asparagus that was frantically erupting from around every tombstone. My wife has similar stories of harvesting spring asparagus from the irrigation ditches on the farm in Boulder County, Colorado, where she kept her horse. Town boy that I was, I had no clue that you could find asparagus growing on the sides of irrigation ditches, but I learned early on that you could always find a healthy crop of it at the Beasley mausoleum after the first rain.

A few times, I was lucky enough to be on the edge of town after a rainstorm and find myself buffeted by the wind blowing the moist pollen from the fields of wheat that stretched away to the horizon. I'd go home later and find myself covered with the stuff; my t-shirt would never be the same again. But while standing at the edge of the dampened fields, I only cared for the smell of the wheat, driven by the still-moist breeze.

The smell of wet wheat is almost indescribable. For a boy growing up in the proverbial center of the Dust Bowl, I can only say that it smelled like "life."

Of course, I was born long after the Dust Bowl, but I remember my mother cursing and crying when the wind blew, telling the stories of her mother making her and her sisters lie on a bed with a wet sheet over them so they wouldn't breathe in the powder-fine dust and develop pneumonia from it.

Some of her anxiety undoubtedly rubbed off on me, but even in the early 60s when I was a child, it didn't take much for me to develop an appreciation for the blessings of rain.

You would think, given my childhood, that I would have fled to a humid climate and never looked back. In college in a damp climate, however, I discovered some of the unsavory things that moisture can do to skin, so it didn't take much to convince me that rain, like so many other blessings, is best enjoyed in moderation.

My godmother, a panhandle girl, followed her husband to a job outside of Charleston, South Carolina. True to her upbringing, she made him string a clothesline between a gum tree and a live oak growing in their back yard, then proceeded to set up housekeeping, hanging the sheets out to dry. Well, they didn't dry; instead, they developed grayish-green stains that spread exactly like mold on a petri dish.

So she made her husband go into Sears and buy her a dryer. Years later when she told me that story, I  could tell that she was ashamed of the fact that she couldn't dry her laundry outside. She never made her peace with the South. It irked her that the alternative to drying her towels in a machine was having mold turn them into gelatinous goo and that, if you were going to dry your sheets outside, you had to put so much Clorox in the water to kill the mold that if you perspired on the sheets during the night, you would wake up in the morning with little white bleached lines on your skin corresponding to the wrinkles in the cloth.

But I digress.

This post is really about the smell of nature after rain. Up here at the High Mountain Lodge, we don't have wheat, but we have acres and acres of pine trees. After a few clear days, the sun has toasted the pine pollen so that, when it rains, the air smells like tincture of Colorado. Of course, the rain will also precipitate the pine pollen out of the air and make yellow streaks all over your car.

You should feel privileged. For a few days, at least, your car will look like a local's.

Come visit us soon, and smell the air.

THE DECK

Isn't it "interesting" how seemingly simple projects can balloon into titanic time-sucks? When we bought the Lodge two years ago, high on our list of "deferred maintenance" issues, we realized we were going to have to address the problem of deteriorating planks in the multi-tiered deck that is the focus of so much of our outdoor hospitality in the summertime.

Alas! A more than 200% of normal snowfall last winter and the persistent snow we had during "mud season" in May caused us to postpone the project a little longer: according to a neighbor who tracks such things, we got over 400 inches of snow at the High Mountain Lodge this past winter, so we were weeks late in beginning the deck repairs.

In addition, when we began pulling up rotting planks, we discovered that the seemingly sound planks next to them were also deteriorating rapidly. Long story short: we are completely replacing the middle tier of the deck with a "composite" material (think recycled plastic soda bottles mixed with sawdust then dyed brown).

A simple weekend project has expanded into a major construction effort, all done while we've been welcoming guests who arrive with a mixed look of indulgence, concern, and alarm. We've been apologetic, and so far I'm managing to suppress the eye-tic that develops every time I have to go into explanation mode.

The good news: the deck will be finished before the holiday weekend (or else I will be hospitalized somewhere and receiving powerful anti-psychotic medication).

Also good news: the weather up here has been spectacular. Our daytime highs are in the mid-70s, with lows dipping into the 40s. Guests from Denver (where it has been in the 90s) can only rave about our perfect weather.

So come on up and enjoy the gentle Colorado breezes while sipping a drink on our brand-new deck. You won't regret the visit!

Green

There is a green that is greener than green, and that green is yellow.

About three weeks ago, around the first of June, in one day we watched the pasture turn green. There were still patches of snow, but the sun was (finally!) warm, and over the course of just a few hours, green stuff sprang to life amid the brown and gray straw of the dead grasses and weeds. In the days that followed, the pasture just got greener, until you didn't think the color could possibly become more saturated.

Then the dandelions started to bloom. Just when you didn't think it could get any more green, the bright yellow deepened the color. Right now, the pasture looks like God threw a staggering quantity of gold dust onto a carpet of emeralds.

The aspens also have leafed out. They bring their own quality of green to the mix. They start out almost yellow when the leaf buds burst open, but as they drink in the sunshine, their color darkens. Years ago, I went on a backpacking trip down in the San Juans in late June, and we walked through a spectacular aspen forest that reminded me of JRR Tolkein's description of elven woods in The Lord of the Rings.

Even the willows have given up their early-spring orange hope. And as the sun goes down, the manes and tails of the horses grazing down there are back-lit and seem to be made of silver.

Lordy! Living up here is turning me into a romantic. Wordsworth would have loved it up here; so would his wife, Dorothy. We don't have the drop-dead views of the Continental Divide and the Indian Peaks (you have to walk to the other side of the pasture to enjoy that spectacular view), but Sheep Mountain to the west, while less dramatic, is no less beautiful. We are learning to love the shadows and highlights the sun makes in its various declivities.

To the end of my days, I will always associate the color green with quiet. Not necessarily silence, mind you. Right now, between the wind (more that a Wordsworthian "gentle breeze", the ceaseless buzz of the hummingbirds, and the swallows quarreling and copulating under the eves, the place is hardly silent. But it's still quiet with the best sort of quiet.

Unexpected Beauty

It was not a dark and stormy night but a damp and chilly afternoon at the High Mountain Lodge. Who knew that the sun, obliterated by the clouds, still had enough gumption to turn the brown, dead fields into gold this afternoon....

Frequently it gets so staggeringly beautiful up here that you wonder if the Chamber of Commerce has a contract with some hideously expensive Hollywood special-effects company--as if the Winter Park/Fraser Valley C of C had enough money to conspire with the Big Boys to turn the valley spectacular at any season--including our current slow time....

Not that the Big Boys could pull this one off. They don't have enough imagination.

We live in a place where nature's gestures are overly large and embarrassingly dramatic. The clouds that in any other place would soar overhead, unreachable, here drizzle down the valleys like spilled buttermilk looking for a low place to sour the floorboards in the kitchen.

And, if the sights don't sock you in the eye, the smells in our valley would put a Paris perfumery to shame. Fallen wet aspen leaves have an indescribable dark aphrodisiacal musk to them. It doesn't take much for them to rot and become soil, but in the magical few weeks after they've given up dazzling our vision with their incomparable fall color and fallen to the ground, they ravage our nose instead of our eyes.

It's no wonder all the large mammals lose their minds this time of year. The elk go into rut and start to bugle; the foxes down in the willows scream at the drop of the hat; the moose do creepy moosey-rut things like destroying outhouses; and the coyotes, lordy, the coyotes behave like freshman frat boys having their first kegger.

When everything seems to be dying, the animals give the lie to the season. This is one of the most fertile times of the year. The colder it gets up here, the more life deepens, and when the snow is an even blanket hiding all that life, we'll be skiing on our future spring.

September

On the first day of September, it was as if God announced that it was fall. The morning temperature on our thermometer was 35 degrees instead of the 40-50 it had been all summer, there was frost on the decks, and we actually had to turn up the thermostat in the dining room. I was actually proud of the fact that our famous chilled orange juice was staying chilled, but Julie pointed out that if people's lips were too numb to feel the glass when they tried to drink it, they probably wouldn't appreciate it that much. So I capitulated.

During the day, the sun is still warm, but time is hastening toward the equinox this month, and earth's northern hemisphere is turning her face away from the sun. The aspen leaves are beginning to turn, and everything is just about perfect right now.

Winter and all its fun is just around the corner, but we're not there yet. We still have September to enjoy, the most perfect month in the high country. In the evening, guests at the High Mountain Lodge are spending more time in the public areas, then retiring to their rooms to enjoy a fire in their fireplace. Woodsmoke incense is starting to bless the valley.

The weather is quiet in September. The Pacific monsoons have blown themselves out and, barring an ill-behaved hurricane that blows up from the Gulf of Mexico, it will be calm here: warm in the daytime, and crisp at night. Of course even a hurricane does blow up the Gulf and across the southwest, it may make Denver miserable, but probably won't get over the Continental Divide.

A local weather forecaster, who has made something of a name for himself accurately predicting to the inch how much snow will fall on the ski areas in any given day, thinks this is going to be a good year for skiing in northern Colorado, courtesy of the La Niña currently chilling the waters off Chile.

We say, bring it on! Yee-haw! and all that. But not until we've enjoyed our gentle and glorious September.

Summer is just around the corner

It's still "mud season" at the High Mountain Lodge. Winter Park and Fraser are close to being deserted. We left town, too, and spent a week visiting relatives in the south east, but now we're back at the Lodge getting ready for summer guests.

After a very successful ski season, it has been nice to catch our breath and take care of chores we put off when we were busy. We're painting and deep cleaning rooms as well as weeding areas in the gardens that are finally free of snow.

Julie took a class in high-altitude gardening and is full of plans and ideas to grow herbs and more hardy vegetables. Expect spinach on the menu quite a bit this summer at the High Mountain Lodge.

She was sort of shocked when she found out that you can't grow summer squash at our elevation. Zucchini and yellow squash need more heat than we're liable to get any given summer. It feels sort of unnatural to be living in a place where you can't grow squash. I'm reminded of the old joke about why, in small towns, August and September are the only months when people lock their cars while going to church: it's to prevent their neighbors from leaving bags of zucchini in the back seat. That being said, here is a very easy squash recipe for those lucky enough to be able to grow them:

Finely slice roughly equal amounts of zucchini and onion. A mandolin works best, but in a pinch you can use a knife. Each slice should be between 1/8 and 1/4 an inch.

Cover the bottom of a sauté pan with olive oil; add a pat of butter. Sauté until vegetables are tender. Correct seasoning. Plate over pasta or as a side dish and top with generous amounts of grated parmigiano reggiano or Peccorino Romano cheese. The parmesan is more elegant, but the peccorino is more authentic. 

This is a traditional paisano recipe from Rome and the Lazio region of Italy. It's simplicity itself, but is a surprisingly savory dish. Serve it al fresco over pasta as a stand-alone light dish in the evening with a glass of well-chilled prosecco. It doesn't get much better than this.

 The meadows below the lodge are finally starting to green up, but Sheep Mountain to the west still has some snow on its higher slopes. That will be gone soon, and before long, the fields will be eye-poppingly beautiful. There are buds on the aspen trees; when they leaf out, light sifting down through them will be filtered green-gold. That's when we'll know summer is really here.