Three Inch Icicle & Explaining Epic 02Feb16

The dumpers on Colorado turned to cold today. 9° is chilly but at least there was no wind. I prepared for cold this season with some new BD Guide gloves - a smidge stiff from all the insulation but recommended if you don't like mittens, like me. Those Leki attachments are tech I chose to interface with my poles years ago after I suffered a skiers thumb sprain for 6 weeks - they'll release the pole under undue pressure. I chose to not go to Vail for the deepest stuff and hit my local Keystone stashes today. It started nice enough in the Outback woods and bowls - found plenty of untracked areas but the book was right at 6" at Keystone - cover was just that unless I found multi-day misses by prior skiers. That's cool, I lapped Cat Dancer to exhaustion a bit. It was still awesome though the chill built a 3" icicle on my stash - I didn't notice but some younger lift-mates took to comment and asked "how?" - I mentioned "I breathe." At Baker's I met a guy at the bar who was marking off a bucket list item to spend a season in CO. He was like 70 and divorced but the cool part is that he and his daughters live in Liberty, PA and they were previously ski instructors at Oregon Hill, where I first ever skied; small world. Regarding bucket list items and why go epic... here on my EpicMix screenshot it's shown - not the days or the vert but the fact that I hit 4 different mountains on consecutive days skiing. Colorado is so cool.