Return to Greensburg & Thanksgiving '08

Kicking off the 2008 festive season with Thanksgiving, Sarah and I decided to drive back to Oklahoma to visit friends and family. On Wednesday afternoon we got organized and headed out along I-70 east all the way into Kansas, with some fun traffic dodging through Denver and then averaging 90mph to the border and avoiding the highway police ;) Sarah had booked a Comfort Inn at Colby, which we arrived at way too early and realised we should have avoided booking and covered as many miles through the plains in the dark as possible. Still, after a good sleep and getting up in the dark, we watched an awesome Kansas sunrise across the flat expanse of crops.

Detouring through back country Kansas we went south from Hays to get to Greensburg. For those who haven't read my earlier post about Greensburg, the town was completely destroyed by the first official EF5 rated tornado under the new enhanced fujita scale in May 2007, a mile and a half wide specimen of the most destructive winds on earth that stripped bark from trees, removed houses from their foundations and changed forever the lives of the people in its way. I went there to volunteer aid and made friends with a local fellow named Gary and helped him load what was left of his family belongings out of his sodden basement to a trailer.

Gary wasn't in the area unfortunately for me; he was in Kansas City visiting his son, so I called his cell as I came into town and spoke to him as he directed me to where his house was; now one of several bulldozed blocks apparently re-zoned to commercial where they intend to relocate the main road through town. The old lady's house across the road from Gary has been restored with a new shell, as she's 97 or something and her family & the community want her to live there the rest of her days. Looking around, a sense of devastation still prevails over the rebuilding, both from the presence of the original, the damaged, but also the absence, particularly in streets intersecting brown blocks of bulldozed dirt. Some destroyed trees remain, a few bent lightpoles, and Gary has bought one of two surviving main street buildings for an authentic angle to his antiques business. Small but encouraging, new development is centered around main street, with a new store and service station and other bits and pieces. I'm sure eventually a good number of original residents will rebuild and move back, and the town will be lush and vibrant again, but the road to recovery will be a while.

Thanksgiving was great, with two meals at two houses for both sides of Sarah's family, we ate until we were sore, and I still didn't put on any weight. The Bedlam Game was on saturday, OU vs OSU (Oklahoma University vs Oklahoma State University) in college football, and the stakes were high. If OU beat OSU, there would be a 3-way tie for who represents the south in the Big 12 conference between Texas, Texas Tech and OU. Then the various polls would decide who gets to play Missouri, winner of the north Big 12. After an epic game and some soon-to-be-immortalized acrobatics by OU's quarterback Sam Bradford, OU whooped OSU by 20 points for the 6th 60+ point total running. The next day around midday when Sarah and I were driving back to Colorado via New Mexico, text messages and calls started coming in about news that OU had made it to the championships, Texas and Texas Tech missing out. This was sweet justice as Texas had flown a plane over the OSU stadium with a banner showing the score when they beat OU, and the lobbying Texas Coach kept going on about how they beat OU blah blah how they should win, while the OU coach and quarterback spoke along the lines of we did our best, we'll keep doing our best and whatever the polls decide is what they decide. Texas' bad sportsmanship before the polls was matched after the polls, everyone wanted to interview the sore loser Texas coach, and it's sweet revenge for OU. No doubt it will just stoke the fire more for next year's game in one of the nation's biggest rivalries.

The drive back was going smoothly until we pulled into a gas station at Texline on the New Mexico border and saw cars coming from the opposite direction coated in snow and ice. After pulling a half dozen tumbleweeds from the front grill, I chatted to some people who came from that direction and they said it was a white out. Sure enough, the hundreds of tumbleweeds we'd been dodging changed to horizontal snow in winds that were probably 50mph in places. Then a couple of dozen miles into NM the road disappeared under a sheet of ice and blowing snow, and we began passing car wrecks, sedans in the ditch with bumpers torn off, trucks on their roofs with cabins totally crushed. We were still cruising at 30-40mph till we hit traffic which slowed us to a crawl, and it took us 2 hours to get through the last dozen miles. One car had even slid off the road, down the banks, 8m across a flat and through a barbed wire fence into a paddock! There were also no ploughing vehicles to be seen, NM doesn't care as much as CO about their highway road conditions (makes sense if they don't even bother to signpost some of their roads).

Colorado ended up being worse; I took this route to have a view instead of flat, straight Kansas, and we ended up with no view and a foot of snowfall, stuck again before Monument for 2.5 hours. I nearly wrecked when a slower car in the right lane with an ignorant retarded driver tried to overtake another car just as I was about to pass and I slid for several seconds, ABS vibrating, towards his bumper before he accelerated enough to pull away. After dinner, Sarah was falling asleep at the wheel in stopped traffic, so we skidded around the car to switch after I had an hour's rest. We finally got past Monument (all the hold ups were caused by a simple hill; no wrecks or anything, just a combination of retarded drivers and incapable vehicles), and we got to I-70 just before midnight. Fortunately the traffic delays of the day (up to 5 hours for some I heard later) had gone, and I cruised at 40mph all the way, through the worst road conditions I'd ever seen. The tunnel is a strange sanctuary in bad weather, you relax but try to prepare for the other side, and then emerge into awesome blowing snow, the road was totally buried and was just a large white surface which I just drove down the center of. Seconds after exiting the tunnel I saw a snow tornado whirling across the highway and I hit it straight on and for a couple of seconds couldn't see anything but white. But the AWD Subaru held it together and got us home safely, even without snow tyres!

Next day at work I found the following stats from the weekend:
A-basin 35" in 3 days
Vail 25" in 2 days
Beaver Creek 11' in 2 days
Copper 28' in 3 days

As well as an avalanche warning from weather.gov:

...AVALANCHE WARNING ISSUED FOR THE FRONT RANGE AND CONTINENTAL DIVIDE FROM THE WYOMING BORDER TO HOOSIER PASS IN SUMMIT COUNTY...

A POWERFUL WINTER STORM SYSTEM BROUGHT SNOWFALL IN EXCESS OF FOUR FEET PLUS VERY STRONG WINDS TO THE WARNING AREA SINCE THANKSGIVING DAY. STRONG WINDS GUSTS UP TO 100 MPH HELPED CREATE DANGEROUS AVALANCHE CONDITIONS.

A NUMBER OF AVALANCHES HAVE BEEN TRIGGERED OVER THE LAST 12 HOURS. SOME OF THESE SLIDES WERE RUNNING TO THE GROUND, TAKING OUT THE WINTER SNOWPACK TO DATE.

So that was my eventful Thanksgiving!

Saw a rainbow by moonlight

Just a quick one I have to write about a most extraordinary thing that I saw a couple of nights ago. Some weather was passing through town one night as part of an early season winter storm, and Sarah & I headed out of the house to pick up dominos pizza in Avon. It was raining lightly and a near full moon was out in the east, and driving away from the moon we suddenly saw this weird line in an arch across the sky, and it took a few seconds before I realized it was a rainbow! I wish I had my camera, it was a full rainbow clear as anything, but with no colour, just a light shade of grey against the night. I could see it was in front of the mountains near me so it was very close coz we were still in the light rain. It must be a super rare, impossible to see from a distance outside the shower like normal rainbows because the light is too faint. I think we only saw it because it was a full moon, lower in the sky with light drizzling rain all around us.

That along with the changing colours of the trees in the fall and the snow we had on the weekend to cover the tops of the hills white again are all the reminder I need to know I'm living in one of the more beautiful places of the world. Bring on the winter.

TEVA Mountain Games

2008 Summer Season, Colorado

The TEVA Mountain Games were held in Vail during the first week of June and I got to the games on the 7th and 8th to see some of the events. The games are timed to coincide with the peak of the melt season, when snowmelt has swollen all the rivers making for the perfect venue for the world's best kayakers to throw down in a variety of river events. In addition to the kayaking, other extreme sports enjoy the spotlight, including mountain biking, bouldering, fly fishing, rafting, paragliding and trail running.

Starting off with the kayak pro rodeo event, the finals were on saturday afternoon in the heart of Vail Village. The Gore Creek flows through the Vail Valley, and the river has a significant 'feature' (to use the river jargon) where the two pedestrian bridges span the river. The feature is a hole, which is caused when a relatively shallow section of river upstream flows over a ridge and plunges downwards, causing a standing wave of churning water that experienced kayakers can surf. Furthermore, the town of Vail invested in some mechanised flaps on the edges of the river upstream of the hole, and when raised the flaps increase the volume and size of the feature significantly.

Vail village brought a great festival ambience in the warm afternoon sun, as the crowd gathered all around the shores, balconies, bridges and stands, young couples, dogs, families and kids, the scene was set for the finals. Soon the female competitors begun warming up, and I'd never imagined such things were possible on a kayak. On either side of the hole downstream by the shore, eddies formed where water sucked back towards the feature. One at a time, the girls would paddle up the eddy and into the hole, bouncing around and then dipping forward and launching into a front flip, or swirling around in a 180 and rolling, appearing to be out of control until they suddenly popped back upright. Sometimes they lost their balance and flipped, but they expertly would flip back upright and paddle for the eddy before being swept too far downstream. The girls each competed to perform as many tricks earning points against the clock. The young girl in the pink boat, who was the daughter of the previous year's male winner, won the event, and then the male competitors entered for warmup. Some of the guys floated downstream and busted straight into the hole doing trick after trick. One guy was particularly impressive, easily dominating the aerial moves, able to get his entire kayak completely out of the water for the entire rotation. Another competitor was a 15 year old kid! He had a huge grin on his face the entire time, knowing he was competing against the same guys he probably idolises. After a couple of rounds of competition, the intensity of the sessions were ramping up with awesome displays of power and control, however the father of the female champ, who had won 2 years in a row, had to give up the title to Justin from Buena Vista, who my friend Mike knows.







After the kayaking freestyle finals we headed over to Golden Peak where the first ever international bouldering competitions were about to take place. Bouldering is like rock climbing but without ropes, so padded mats are placed under the walls, which are tall, but not so tall to cause serious injury when falling. Patches of snow still lay on the slopes behind the crowd as the field of American, Austrian, British and French competitors came out to survey the four sets of problems laid out on the walls. Combinations of overhangs, tiny moulds, big moulds and wall edges made for incredibly challenging climbs. The competitors collectively had a few minutes to discuss and plan their climbing strategy, which looked kind of funny as they all stood there waving arms over their head, pointing or mentally going through the grips and positions they'd use. For all their planning though, when it came to their turn, I think the plans mostly went out the window as they struggled for grip on each mould. Sometimes, particularly with the males, when they lost grip, the tension in their body flung them spinning away from the wall, while the girls weren't too shabby looking and still had more strength than the average guy. The crowd favourite was the second wall for the guys, where they would start out under about a 40 degree overhang, and have to jump sideways and reach around the overhang edge, grabbing for a big circular mould, resulting in their whole body swinging almost horizontal into the air, legs flailing drawing cheers from the crowd and praise from the announcer.

The final day held the kayak 8 ball competition, a crowd favourite, and one of the more dangerous events of the games. A few years earlier a kayak competitor had dreamed the event up; a team of competitors start upstream of the feature, just where the river bends and goes out of sight. They race downstream against the clock, however lying in wait to thwart their progress, are the 8 balls, kayakers in black vests ready to ambush from eddies and with tactics of ramming, blocking and basically whatever goes, to slow the competitors down. Bumpers are hung from the bridge to tangle and knock the heads of those who aren't watching out, and finally the hole provides one last opportunity for carnage before the finish line. Competitors from the other kayaking events, including the females, served as 8 ballers, and seemed unfazed by the roughness.



After the first round of 8 ball, the rafting finals were on, with two guys each with a paddle in rafts custom designed for this event. They had to go around a series of 3 gates that were located on the edges of eddies, meaning they had to go downstream, behind the gate, back up the eddy and around the gate back into the mainstream. The greatest moment of the day, was when first place came down to the last gate behind the hole but went wide and had to paddle furiously to stop going downstream. Then second place came in and bumped in ahead of first, taking the lead, but also losing their momentum. Then last place came in on a perfect approach, and snuck infront ramming the two struggling rafts, rounding the gate to come from behind and take first place as the crowd went crazy.

The 8 ball finals were epic, every round had eight 8 ballers, meaning two to one on the competitors, and they always had two 8 ballers stationed down at the hole. Every round, four competitors and up to six 8 ballers would come racing down river, and two 8 ballers would head straight into them as they plunged through the hole, ramming boats, clashing paddles, sometimes going over the top of one another. I saw several competitors and 8 ballers cop a kayak bow in the ribs, getting their paddle caught in the bumpers which then hits them in the face, and even another guy took a kayak bow to the face. Amazingly there were no serious injuries.



Hope you enjoyed the photos and video!

2008 Summer Season, Colorado