Early Saturday we headed over to Grand County to compete in the Snow Mountain Ranch Stampede 42km Nordic race. The Stampede is one of oldest and most attended x-c ski races in the state. The course is challenging and 42km of fun. Kerry and I both produced excellent results. Kerry took 3rd in women's classic and I topped the podium for the 2nd weekend in a row. The conditions were the typical cold & dry Colorado snow. To add little excitement to picking my race skis and the pre-race warm up, I discovered I missed the wax by 7 degrees Celsius on the warm side easily. The week preceding the race, Colorado went through major warm spell and we were fooled into thinking the weather would remain warm on Saturday. I should have rembered that Grand County is always one of the coldest places in the country. I did not decide on which pair of my skis to use until about 10 minutes before the start. Usually, I make my ski selection at least 45 - 60 minutes prior to starting. I flipped a coin and went with warmer of the two pair that I had narrowed it down to.
I was able to make my winning move on a long sun exposed climb 15 km into the race and then steadily increase the time gap over the rest of the field all the way to the finish line. Kerry made a move on 'the lady in orange' (the woman beat her last week in leadville ), about 15 km into the race. This put her into 3rd place, but after the hard effort she was unable to ski down 1st or 2nd place.
Sunday morning we slept in, well Kerry slept in till 9:00am, I can never sleep past 7:00am. Then we spent most the morning getting motivated with the help of our coffee press while planning our early summer bike tour in
Europe. After the outside air temperature warmed up, we decided on a mill creek, mushroom bowl ski tour. Essentially a 30 km lap around the Vail Mountain Ski area with about 1400 meters of climbing. Kerry decided to make the tour on her 10 year old Atomic wax-less skis and I decided to skate ski the route. A decision I regretted about half way in. It is much easier to climb 1400 meters on classic skis than skate skis. The weather and skiing were perfect. Vail must have groomed the mill creek road on Saturday making for perfect skate skiing
The air temp was near or above 0 degrees Celsius and just a scattering of clouds in the sky. I skied both climbs with short sleeves and no gloves. Since Kerry was on Classic and I was on skate skis we split up for the tour. The ski took Kerry around 5 hours and me around 3 1/2 hours. I felt wasted from the previous days race I believe I normally do this route in under 3 hours(if only I had gotten the wax right). On the 2nd major climb from the bottom of China Bowl to the top of PHQ (Patrol Head Quarters, top of Vail Mountain), I could barely lift my arms to pull and my head was hanging so low, I though I was going to kiss the tips of my skis. Anyways, it has an excellent weekend of training for the North Routte. Hopefully a good result and race will come for both of us.
In case anyone is interested in doing one of the hardest skate ski tours in the Vail Valley, I mapped out the route below.
Zodiac Spires from Benchmark
Mount Holy Cross looking past Blue Ski Basin
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