Love and lechery in the western US/#skihillcuteboys2021

Candle that burns the brightest....?
Seriously tho you kinda nailed it.

Day 3

we woke up to a nice dusting of snow on our tents.
(2nd favorite pic of trip)
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We drove to copper mountain.
While jimmy and Renan went to get their rental equipment I dawned my fine French skis and headed straight for the lift to get in a quick lap and to make sure my pass hadn’t been suspended for borderline hate speech on Twitter. (Long story)

when I got to the bottom of the run jimmy and Renan were sitting at a table drinking 16oz pbr’s.
jimmy proclaimed
“Yeah dude so we went ahead and got a hotel for the next couple days before we check into the Airbnb” 😂😂😂
I thought to myself
“I love it when a plan comes together”
(And that’s how you get 2 nights in a warm hotel room with hot tub access for the cost of a case of coors light beer) 😉

we headed for the bunny hill.
As mentioned above jimmy and I grew up waterskiing on weekends in the summer so he was taking to it pretty quickly.
On the other hand, poor Renan had never been waterskiing and was struggling just to stand up with the skis on.
He took some body jarring shots over the next few days that I thought for sure were gonna send him to the hospital, but he kept at it and by the end of day 3 he was making it up and down the bunny hill like a pro.
(not that I know anything about how a pro skis or anything about skiing at all for that matter.

day 4
We drove to our campsite, Renan watched the car, jimmy and I hiked in and got our stuff.
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went back to copper and skied all day.

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*worth noting: while checking into the hotel there was a car parked there with Colorado plates that simply read
“OAK”
I thought to myself
“Expert?”
I wish I would’ve got a picture...
I may never know...
but I didn’t see any saddled up rams tied up anywhere so it was probably someone else 🤷‍♂️
 
I don't care how many times you say it "fine French skis" always makes me laugh.
I prefer my starkly utilitarian German skis....

tenor.gif
 
*winter camping tip:
This is prob common sense to most of you super HxC mountaineers on here but if it’s gonna be below freezing make sure to pull slack in all the laces of your boots and pull the tongue out and expand them as much as possible before going to bed.
I thought I was gonna have to get a fire going in order to thaw mine out and get my feet into them Monday morning, but after some prying and flexing I was able to get them crammed in.

days 5-7
We lived the good life.
2 nights in a hotel in a fancy mountain town.
2 nights in a ski in/out condo at copper.
Renan claimed to have taken some cooking classes at some point in his life and since jimmy and I had been carrying his stuff he agreed to cook all the meals. (I had packed quite literally everything from the kitchen but the sink)
Food was great.
We all ejected from our skis multiple times.

*winter camping tip:
$35 charbroil portable gas grill nicely compliments a Coleman 2 burner.
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Day 8
We packed all of our ish into the car for the last time (thank god!)
I drove Jimmy and Renan to the airport.
They flew home to their families.
I headed for Utah.

*winter camping tip:
If I would’ve know I was gonna be passing through Laramie, Wyoming on my way to SLC I would’ve stopped by @rwc101 ‘s house and upper decked his toilet.
next time...
 
Day 9
Left Airbnb in slc, drove to campground in BCC, set up tent, skied at solitude.
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day 10
Met up with @Wildabeast (sorry for dragging you into this mildly inappropriate story) at deer valley and had a blast skiing with him.
This was my first time skiing with someone who knew how to ski and for better or worse it really made me push to speeds way beyond my comfort zone and opened my mind as to how fun flying down groomers can be.

day 11
Slept in. Getting out of a warm sleeping bag is hard.
went to Alta.
Ate a turkey and tillamook sandwich in the parking lot.
Stunted on some dude who claimed to be a mba student from usc who had skied approx the same amount of times as me.
He was from California and didn’t even know who Scott, Rob, Cody or Shane(rip) are so yeah take that for what it is.
(some people need to get their priorities straight)

and this is where the story gets weird and creepy.
love and lechery:
Not to get too emotional on you guys, but basically when I was in my mid 20’s I was just kinda lost, bored, down on myself for being a juco drop out and desperately looking for something to go do.
I got lucky and heard dork ass Cam Hanes on JRE talking about going backcountry hunting and he really just made it sound cool as hell 🤷‍♂️
And yeah, I was kinda like
“ yeah bro! I’m good at things I want to be good at, not what people tell me to do! Im not going back to school! I’m gonna be a public land elk hunter!” 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️
(What a moron)
But yeah for a few years I did some cycling, running, hiking, hunting, got comfortable being in the woods in the dark, drove to Colorado alone and killed a bull on opening day of archery season on the most shit house luck hunt of all time.
laugh at me for this if you will but there were just some parts of this journey that felt very fate and destiny like.
1. my first night in a tree stand since I was like 13 when I was still apprehensive as to whether or not I wanted to get back into hunting I killed a doe with my bow from 2004ish while wearing my camo from the same era. My bibs barely came down last my knees. Lol
2. My first ever time in the mountains after hiking 2.5mi up a 4wd road that I definitely thought I was gonna be able to drive in my Jetta Jimmy and I arrived at the trailhead to find a severed elks leg laying right in the middle of the trail. Is that weird?
“I guess there are elk here”
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3. I accidentally called an elk into my camp and shot him twice with a bow and arrow.
4. after leaving him overnight and not being able to find any blood the next day I was walking back up the main trail in the area after grid searching the hillside with tears in my eyes because I was pretty sure I’d killed that poor thing and I’d come so close to doing what I’d set out to do when I looked up and that son of a bitch was laying dead right in the middle of the freaking walking trail.
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*it turned into a rodeo. It was hot AF. I lost a lot of meat.
I suck 🤦‍♂️
It’s gonna be a long time before I try to solo hunt an elk again. Deer tags only for awhile.
 
Day 11/love and lechery explanation continued:

so yeah I got home from that hunt, shot a doe on opening night of whitetail season, lost her (I suck) and harvested her son (i’m a monster) the next day.

So I was kinda on a roll and then I scored this crazy date with this pilot/climber chick that was pretty rad and kinda blew my mind.
(while I’ve never outdoor climbed, I’m kinda obsessed with climbing docs and you don’t meet that many climbers in east central il)
She was a real adventurer like you guys and had grown up in the west and done all this cool mountain stuff.
So yeah, I was basically star struck.
The morning after I went on this date with her I immediately logged into ht to tell my super HxC adventure pen pal this same crazy, fantastical story that I’m telling right now about how all of the pieces of my life were just starting to fall into place and I was getting life figured out when she messaged me something to the effect of
“Yeah so I’m a Portland stripped too”
*this was funny because the week before I had cancelled a date with an Illinois stripper because I’d had an epiphany and decided that
“Public lane elk hunters are men of morals and they don’t date strippers”
I definitely did like a 15min comedy set about this whilst on the date with the Portland stripper 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️Lmao
“The older you get the less you know”
But yeah, her and I became friends. She kinda gave me the extra little push over the edge to really get involved in the backpacking/outdoor thing and indoor bouldering, but eventually it petered out and one day I left her on read

but... she was from Utah and had mentioned how cool the slc resorts were and trying to impress her was definitely 10-20% of the reason I’d even gone out there so I was less than thrilled when my Loyd Christmas ass messaged her a picture of my fine French skis with a LCC filter and asked her what she’d been up to only to find out that she was living with a new boyfriend in a super rad mountain town and I was sleeping on the snow alone in the mountains quite literally like the unabomber.
I like words.
She has a good vocabulary.
she made a funny comment about my uncanny ability to combine sorrow, lechery and adventure.
That’s where the title comes from. And it just sounded cool.
kinda like
Fear and loathing in Las Vegas
Love and lechery in the western US
🤷‍♂️

Anyways, I was inappropriately and perhaps creepily bummed out, tired AF and malnourished. In like 36hrs i’d eaten like 1 peak refuel a turkey sandwich and some granola bars.
I had a bit of a millennial moment.
Brett Michaels started singing in my head.
there was no snow in the forecast.
I really felt like tomahawking my poles as far as I could in either direction, spiking my fine French skis tip first into the asphalt, neutral dropping my car into drive, chirping the tires a little bit and running the skis over on the way out of the lot, but instead I maintained my composure, put on The Band radio on Pandora, reflected on life and made the beautiful drive down LCC and back up BCC to my campsite while Levon Helm sang his best version of “when I paint my masterpiece”

*weirdest ht post ever.
monkey’s out of the hat.
I’m a weirdo. 🤦‍♂️
 
Weird and creepy? Nah. More like heartfelt and introspective and very, very human—and I like it a bunch. Thanks for sharing all that, Douglas. You should move out west.

Also, in terms of words and writing style, have you ever read the collection of short stories by Denis Johnson called Jesus’ Son? If not, you should. I imagine it would speak to you like it spoke to me in a very similar phase of my life.
 
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