Austria

For those of you who didn’t track this last year, Woody’s is a bold venture to open a quality restaurant up at the Western Colorado trailhead town of Marble. It’s just like the road end gasthauses in Austria, only the food is a bit different. Everyone, please support Woody! The chili special today was only six bucks — worth twice that — and would have cost three times that in Aspen. Lisa had the chili, I had the brisket with potato salad and sweet tea.

After yesterday’s partly cloudy skies, and thus cutting the last of the day’s goals, we, of course, picked roast bluebird off the Day 4 fantasy menu. And yes, next morning our dreams became reality: perfect azure skies, hundreds of square…

Is slogging up a ski area for five hours the way to start a classic ski tour in the Alps? No. So day one or our Silvretta adventure involved a few ski lifts, which then morphed to an easy short tour leading to the Heidelberger Hutte.

My flight over here was as flawless as it can get. Hanging on the aisle with an empty seat next to me, slept nearly the whole time. Through customs and Ted meets me at Starbucks just like we’d planned. (and…

Ok, on the road headed for Austria, Switzerland where we’ll backcountry ski the Silvretta Traverwse! Drove over to Boulder yesterday afternoon and visited Brian Litz, co-founder of Backcountry Magazine and general man about the Colorado mountains. Got together with him, Gordon Banks, Pam Rice and Chris Webster for some of that Littelton Mexican food Brian kept promising. Pam and Chris got Capitol Peak skied last year. Chris only has two 14ers to go to have skied them all, and Pam has just over a dozen more to be the FIRST WOMAN to lay tracks on every 14,000-foot peak in Colorado!

Black Diamond Spot and Icon headlamps reviewed, great choices for night time backcountry skiing, biking, running or camping