First the big news, Tara and I will be at Holden for another year!!! We’ll be here till July 2012. I got a promotion to Utilities lead from utilities assistant, which means a little more responsibility, and I am looking forward to it. Tara will continue to work in the craft cave.
The winter has been quiet and enjoyable, and I couldn’t ask for much more. I skied every day this past week, not a bad way to get some daily exercise. I get done with work around 4:00 throw on my boots and skins on my skis, skin up for 20-30 minutes, take a run in beautiful powder, and head in for dinner. After 2 months of not being used, my powder skis are finally back in action! Last week I went out with a couple of guys to the Big creek valley, about 2 hours from the village. We found a huge open slope with a foot of powder, and made a day of taking laps up and down the slope, it was amazing. During the few hours we were out there we saw three avalanches come down on the east facing slope on the other side of the valley. As the sun warmed the rocks and snow, it loosened and started to drop, which made for some incredible sites and sounds. We decided to get off the slope we were on well before the sun hit its upper reaches, which coincided nicely with the time we wanted to leave to be back in time for dinner, you can’t miss pizza night.
I was planning on heading up to big creek yesterday to explore more of the valley. I had my gear packed, and was about to take off when I remembered that I was responsible for power outages, I checked with the other people who can turn the power back on and they all had plans, so I had to stick around the village. But I had a decent back up plan, brewing another batch of beer. So I took a quick ski run with Brian covering outages for an hour, then I dove into my newest hobby.
I have found brewing a great way to spend some time. It is a long 8-9 hour process, but it is relaxing, and I love investing the time to make a quality product. Since we don’t do too much cooking up here, this is a good outlet for making something and being involved in our food, or in this case drink. At Holden it is very economical to make 5 gallons of beer. The hops we picked in September, I use the yeast slurry from someone else’s beer after it has been fermenting for a week, and the 12 pounds of barley cost two bottles of the finished product to our brew-master/barely supplier Terry. So it is free. It is better priced and better tasting than what you can buy in the store. Barley, hops, yeast, and water not a bad way to spend your time in winter. Maybe some time I’ll document the whole process and post it here, we’ll see.
In about three weeks we are taking off to Southern Utah and Northern Arizona to visit Arches, Bryce, Zion, and Grand Canyon national parks. We are going to hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and spend two nights down there.
bvl
Growing Barley, beer in progress, beer.
Skis
Looking across the valley where we saw the avalanches
Turns
Our slope in big creek, we only skied the bottom 1/4, and still skied over 500' each run.
No comments:
Post a Comment