Happy New Year everyone! I’m driving over the hill this morning to Boulder, Colorado where I’ll visit Dynafit’s North American contingent. They’re taking the day off for the first time in ages so I’ll try not to be too much of a bother, but it’ll be good to connect in person. More, I’ll immediately get an extensive take on what’s new in the Dynafit world for 2008, so I’ll be better prepared for blogging when I get hit with the full slam in a few days in Munich.
Speaking of which, I’ll be flying out of Denver tomorrow morning and landing in Europe about a day later. Blog plan is to do a travelogue like last year, along with plenty of writing about what’s new at Dynafit. This’ll be practice for a return trip in March, when we’ll be visiting a bunch of well known equipment makers such as Garmont, Scarpa and Trab (We do like Dynafit here, but need to be careful we don’t ignore everyone else — they all seem to like being mentioned on WildSnow!).
As always, packing for a 2-week EU trip has been interesting. I got two medium sized luggage pieces so I can easily keep each under the 50 pound limit and have them pack nicely. They hook up so they’ll roll around together. Tried to limit the amount of junk. But with a trip this length it’s impossible to know if the weather will be super cold or balmy, so you have to have a range of mountaineering clothing. For example, if weather is dry and cold I like carrying a super light down puffy, but if it’s wetter and warmer I’d rather have all synthetic. Oh well, as long as I can keep the total under 100 pounds I’ll just keep throwing stuff in. Two pounds of Cytomax and a dozen Cliff Bars rounds out the mix.
For carryon I got a small backpack at Wallyworld that’s designed to carry a notebook computer. I’m sick of lugging a heavy shoulder bag around the airport — it’ll be nice to just shoulder a small pack. I’ll also carry on my ski boots as they’re the only thing that would be hard to replace if my luggage got lost, since they’re custom fitted and all. I’m not looking forward to carrying the glowing fluorescent green Zzeros around the airport, oh well, the things we do in the name of alpinism. At least the boots are light when slung around the neck.
WildSnow.com publisher emeritus and founder Lou (Louis Dawson) has a 50+ years career in climbing, backcountry skiing and ski mountaineering. He was the first person in history to ski down all 54 Colorado 14,000-foot peaks, has authored numerous books about about backcountry skiing, and has skied from the summit of Denali in Alaska, North America’s highest mountain.
