All out skiing

I miss Marilyn now in more ways. She always set a leisurely pace for my cross-country skiing. I carried the water and would always get to stop and let her drink. Even though I did that again today, my daughter rarely stopped. Further, with Marilyn I could count on maybe two hours in the morning and an hour in the afternoon before she was tired enough to hit the stores, restaurants or even the hotel room. Excluding breaks, we skied three hours before lunch and two and one half hours after lunch.

She would have probably had me ski more but the trails closed just 15 minutes after we got off of them.

It wouldn't have been too bad had we not had competing objectives. She wanted to maximize her exercise and I wanted the fun of downhill. She just added my objective to hers. This meant that we had to ski all of the green, easiest, trails because they were mostly flat and required the most work. She was also okay with going up hill although except for the short shallow downs, she walked back down.

The first major up slope trail we tried, was after I thought she was ready for some steeper downs and had her try one out. I don't know what happened, but she had a serious nose plant, which turned her off of steep downs. Fortunately there were some shorter shallow downs on the Bjorn Loppet trail. I had her practice first just starting and stopping, but going straight, for a few times. (I didn't go down every time she did, which helped separate her objective from mine just a bit.) Then I had her go down only stopping at the bottom. Then I had her snake down the slope. The next short shallow down had a turn in it. I have some pictures of her doing this in my Kodak Gallery album.

After lunch she laid out her ambitious plan to ski all of the green trails, which had us going from the Warming Hut as far to one side as possible and then back to the other side. When we were about to finish before 3:30 PM, she realized that we had missed a couple of short sections of green. Rather than just boringly retrace our glides, she suggested we make the Aspen Forest loop. We did. Finally she was tired and talking of exhaustion but we still had two trails to complete. Fortunately, one was truly on the most direct route from where we were to the trail head.

If we hadn't rented the ski equipment for two days, I don't think we would be skiing tomorrow. As it is, we may not be skiing long. We don't have that many trails we haven't been on that are open.