I've never seen so much snow in my life

A few days after getting back from Tucson, I hit the road with my friends Martha and Ginger to meet up with our friend Miquette in Crested Butte, CO for a girl's weekend of skiing. I love the town of Crested Butte and I love the slopes there even more. Now, granted, I have yet to go to any of the major ski slopes within 2 hours of our house, but from what I hear, they tend to be very crowded and you usually have to sit in lots of traffic to get there or get home. The past 2 years, Miquette has offered up her condo to us for the weekend, and it's great. We check our skiis, the nice young boys take them to the slopes for us, we roll out of bed, get dressed, walk the 500 feet to the slopes, get our skiis and we're on our way! We had beautiful weather this year, absolutely perfect conditions. It snowed off and on our first 2 days there. Our final 24 hours there, it dumped 15 inches of snow. (They got 21 total that week.) INSANE. I couldn't help taking pictures of it all.

Ok. Bear with me for some perspective here... We were on the 4th floor of the condominium. Looking STRAIGHT out our window, this is what we saw in the mornings, across the street.You may say, "Big deal, it's a man shoveling snow." Yes, that's true. The zoom on my little point and shoot isn't good enough to show that this man is tied to that 'post' he is standing next to because...he is standing on a roof, shoveling snow. He is the 3rd post looking thing in the upper left hand side of this picture. For a little more perspective, here it is zoomed out a little more this time...Now, he is the tiny dot just to the up and left of center in this picture. You can click on the picture to see it larger. Yeah, and what you can't see in this picture is the several floors of balconies below the roof he is standing on, because they're covered by the freaking avalanche!! (No Mom, don't worry, it wasn't really an avalanche.) Those people must feel like they live in a cave or something, they can't see out at all!! Yikes!!

Ok, let's play a game. Find the sign:
Or how about this one, find the HOUSE:

And yes, you may notice the bicycles in the picture above. Yes, the hippies of Crested Butte ride their bicycles in all this snow. And what's a hippie to do when he need to park his bike and the bike rack is covered in snow?Just smush it into the nearest snow bank.


We all had a wonderful time. Unfortunately I got more pictures of the town and all it's snow than I did of the slopes. Here is one we got someone to take for us. Miquette didn't join us on the slopes as she had to delay her trip a day and a half to shake a nasty respiratory bug. Oh, and I did not eat the mussels this year and managed to get through the weekend without getting sick.