February turned out to be a bit of a strange month as far as weather goes in Telluride. Typically we get our biggest and best snowstorms in this part of the winter, but after 60" of powder in January the snow gods must have gotten confused and thought it was time for spring. The last month has been marked by uncharacteristically high temperatures and weeks of sunshine. That might sound nice to those of you who are sick of shoveling out your driveway, but on a ski resort 50 degrees and sunny is cause for alarm. We were lucky that we had such above-average snowfall at the beginning of the season, because over the last month we've lost a lot of our base. With no fresh snow on the mountain, motivation to ride has been a bit low for us, so we've been spending lots of our time off in the library trying to plan our wedding, or traveling outside of Telluride to find some other adventures.
The one upside to not having a lot of powder-days is we finally got the chance to go ice climbing in Ouray without feeling like we were missing out on good snow. We managed to make two climbing trips in February and considering the warm temperatures and the amount of the river that had thawed in the canyon they will probably be our only trips this season. Both times we left Telluride the night before and camped in our truck in the parking lot so that we could get up bright and early and climb all day. On our first trip we met some really great people from Northern California who we were able to swap routes with, and at the end of the day they even shared their crockpot dinner with us back at their hotel! Our second time in Ouray we brought along Steve's cousin Tyler for his first ever ice climbing adventure. We managed to get in quite a few climbs on three different routes, including one with a chimney-style crux between two pillars of ice that challenged all of us to our limits of strength and flexibility.
Just when we had resigned ourselves to nothing but spring-skiing for the rest of the season, the snow gods blew back in with a little two day storm at the end of the month. Although the base of the mountain only got about 4" in 48 hours, the upper slopes got pounded, and that plus a bit of wind-loading made for the best run on Palmyra either of us has ever had. We had planned on hiking to Mountain Quail, about a 30 minute hike from the top of lift 12, but we got there just as ski patrol was opening the peak, so we decided to go all the way and we were rewarded with waist deep turns on untouched powder. Neither of us had ever been all the way to the summit of Palmyra before, preferring to drop just below on a run called Tramshot, but after two hours of climbing through knee-deep drifts we knew it would be worth it to go all the way. The snow was so deep we never even touched the bottom!
We've only got a few more weeks here in Telluride before we pack up and head up to Alaska for the summer. Its crazy how fast this winter has flown by, but looking back we've had a lot of really great adventures so we really can't complain. Spring break is coming up in the next few weeks, so we'll both be busy teaching for ski school almost every day of the week. Between working, packing and planning a wedding its going to be a busy last month in paradise.
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