Sunday In The Park With Jorge

Headed out today for some cross-country skiing with my coworker Jorge:



We were going up past the Valles Caldera, outside Los Alamos. There's been a few snow storms over the past few weeks, so we were pretty assured of good conditions.

The drive took us past the snow-covered caldera.



We headed out on one of the trailheads for the Las Conchas trails (near an earlier hike) that travel along the stream. It was an open space, some tracks that we could follow, but still powdery. Figure there's at least a foot of snow on the ground. It was good going, not a lot of gliding, but it wasn't exactly slogging through the backcountry either. We ran into three people going out, two coming back, so it was a peaceful, quiet trip.





About an hour out, the trail just kind of ends at a fence. The sudden appearance of water lent credence to the theory that we were actually skiing on the streambed.



As we were resting at the end of the trail, clouds rolled in. By the time we were underway, it was snowing.



Made it back to the truck, about two hours round trip. Had some Fluffernutters and decided to hit the trails at the west end of Bandelier. The trails are just east of the caldera, before the switchback down begins. We headed off on the orange-blazed trail, knowing it went along Frijoles Canyon and looped around somehow, but unclear of the specfics.

This was more like the skiing I'm used to (well, from 20 years ago) — more established trails through woods. The going was faster, the snow abated soon after we started.



The trail leads to a couple spots overlooking the west end of the canyon.



We started looping back, at that point feeling we'd just about skied enough. We wound up on a different route back, so were never quite clear how much further we had to go. As it turns out, it was another two-hour round trip. We later agreed that we could have sworn our skis were sticking there at the end, but flipping them over at the end of the trail, found no evidence of snow buildup.