Elkicide Racer

Went up to race the Colorado Stampede XC ski race up near Granby this weekend. A nice little 7 hour car jaunt with Elena and Paul. Good company for a nice long trip. Raced saturday, skied a bit more today and did a bunch of driving. The harsh winter brought the elk and deer herds down to the valleys. It was cool to see an elk herd of 200 plus somewhere near Buena Vista Co. Less cool to see many hundreds of white tail everywhere including in the road as night fell. Much much less cool to see three enormous wild eyed elk cows about three feet from the right bumper as I crested a rise at 70 mph just north of tres piedras NM. At least the moose have not made it to NM yet...

We stopped in Leadville, Co (10,200 feet) for meals on the way up and back. It was -3 degrees F and blowing crazy snow on Friday at noon. And maybe 30F and sunny Sunday afternoon. What a difference. They were setting up some sort of main street horse-skijooring competition with jumps on it, but alas, we had to motor on and we missed the event.The Tennessee Pass is a nice lunch and dinner joint and at 4 hours from Los Alamos, a good middlish point on the drive. Today there was a sweet Schwinn Racer 3 speed parked outside, that possibly belonged to a local xc race promoter, should have talked to him a bit more.


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The bike had a nice Schwinn Cablelock on it (the chromed bit in the main triangle) that hold two lengths of retractable cable, also the requisite wald basket and nice golf bulb generator light. Pretty nice.

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Hopefully I will get on the race report and some other blogging backlog this week, now to sleeeeep.