Four minute walk

A four minute walk from downtown Telluride.

Free Box Season

Off season is free box season in Telluride. Computers, TV, Cd players, sofas, futons, tables, and cookware are just some of the things you can find if you keep a good eye out. More then one lucky free boxer has found a key and turned around to find a matching car. I have got my dresser, table, bed, and most of my clothes from the free box. Just another reason why Telluride is better then where you live.

A cabin in the woods

So now that its summer Im going to be living for free here. Its like a 15 minute hike from town. I just shoveled it all out, replaced the broken windows, and brought down all the trash and old stuff. I have a small artist space paid for in full so i can keep working with my computer. Im pretty stoked.

A long night (Tomboy)

On Feb. 18th before I went to bed, my roommate Noah and friend Anna Marie convinced me to hike with them to Ouray. There we would get a ride from Anna Marie's sister back to Telluride. The next morning I called in sick for work, packed my backpack, grabbed my board, and started hiking on Tomboy Rd. Toward Imagene pass. Around 4pm we decided Ouray was out of the question and we needed to turn around.
Noah and I were making good time snowboarding down but Anna Marie, overinflating her snowboarding skills before hand, was lagging behind and getting stuck. After a long spell of Noah and I waiting I decided to hike back to find Anna Marie. I found her sitting on a rock, still strapped in, sucking on an inhaler, crying. Screaming "we are going to f***ing die out here if you don't keep going" didn't help her mental state. With her pack and mine, her board in one hand and her hand in the other, we slowly made our way back to Noah. This process took at least an hour because Noah and I went to far ahead, and by the time we were all back together it was darker, colder, and much more windy. My goggles were badly fogged and impossible to see out of, which forced me to walk blind wile lifting my goggs to see intermediately. Anna Marie's hands were freezing in her gloves so we switched and I gave her my mittens. The glove fingers went inside out when she took them off and froze, so I wore them with a closed fist, taking them off when I had to use my hands. At this point we knew there was no getting off the mountain that night and we needed shelter.
We explored the old Tomboy mining area on the way up and decided to take refuge in the best building we could find. The building we decided on, we were later told, is called the 'powder cashe', and was used to store explosives up to the early 1900's. It's maybe a 10' x 10' x 10' concrete cube with a doorless threshold. I busted up a 100 year old book shelf and I started a fire with the blank pages of my notebook wile Noah cleared the room of snow and piled it up in the door way. We put all our snowboards in upright and left a gap at the top for the smoke to escape. At that point it turned from life or death into a long uncomfortable night.
And sunrise we streached, got our gear together and started snow shoeing back down to Telluride. I was going to be late to snow board with my cousin's so I went on ahead. Almost halfway down I saw some people skinning up and as they got closer I noticed they were search and rescue and I thought, that suck for someone. When they asked if I was Noah I must have swore. The nest hour was answering questions, getting lectures, signing papers, and convincing them that we didn't have frost bite, that it was only soot. And that's pretty much it. We were interviewed over speaker phone for about 4 minutes and misrepresented and miss-quoted in the paper the next day. Front page even. Here is the article from the Daily Planet and here is my letter to the editor in response. It was my favorite experience of the winter and I'm going to re-attempt it again soon.