Salida Run

I drove to Salida Saturday night and slept in the back of my CR-V. (Where else would I sleep? - oh yeah - the ground.)
There was a nasty winter storm stuck on the entire Continental Divide. I swear, the wind was raging but the storm didn't budge.
And Leadville was socked into it. Leadville has nowhere else to shove the snow. The ice on the streets is a real problem. Residents are driving a few miles south to get out of the storm. The mountain ranges have kept the storms over the Divide and Leadville for the past month, and at the same time have left the Buena Vista and Salida southern part of the valley unscathed.

The run was just a bunch of trail runners who love to run, and don't care that the trail markings are maybe not where you might want them, and there's no aid stations. Everyone has to be back-country proficient. "Lost" should onlly mean you aren't on the run's intended course. We're each required to be savvy enough to never be in danger of being lost in the wilderness, unable to find our way back to Salida.

The run began late - about 8:50am - and ended whenever we got back. For me that was about 12:50? I already don't remember.
The course was 17.7 miles of the most awesome single-track, double-track, and no-track bushwacking you ever saw. Logs to jump over, rocks, watch those tree branches there's so many across the trail. If you're looking down and not paying attention you could get your noggin cracked. There were stretches where you had o just plow through the branches. There's a flase crater that we do an up-and-back on. not volcanic but just the weird way the rock is. The weather threatened a winter storm with a strong wind, but most of the course was protected from that.

All the legends were there, and we had pot-luck afterwards. People from Run Rabbit Run, Hard Rock, Leadville's races, Collegiate Peaks 50 in Buena Vista, ...
To aviod any possibility of confrontation with the Nat'l Forest Service, I won't mention names.

Apparently there's so much Microsoft Windows work to do in Salida, the five compitent guys servicing Salida can't keep up. They have a 3-5 day backlog. So I could move there and be instantly self-employed. But I'd still take a cut in pay, and definitely benefits. Nope, I need to wait until my son is graduated from High School before I take my life back completely. Even with all the running I do, I'm still beholden to my fatherly duties ahead of everything else.

A very fun weekend.