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Written by Brian Olsen
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Saturday, 22 November 2003 00:00 |
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Location: West Yellowstone, MT
The past three days have been a blur of driving and flying around the country to find a place that I can start my on-snow skiing. I have traveled from Vermont to Maine, returning to Maine, and finally to Montana, where I am at the moment.
On Wednesday after I had finished my German and Russian courses, I drove six-and-a-half hours from Burlington, Vermont to Fort Kent, Maine in search of snow. The previous morning, I had been able to do a workout on decent snow at Bolton Valley Resort. Little to my knowledge, a storm was brewing to the west.
As I was driving to Fort Kent, the storm hit full force. I could barely see the road in front of me, even with my windshield wipers on full speed. Nevertheless, I was confident that there would be some amount of snow waiting for me in Fort Kent. In the past, I knew that I could be raining in other places in Northern Maine, but be snowing up at the "higher" altitude where the venue is located.
When I arrived in Fort Kent, I could not believe what I found. The snow that I had heard was there had been wiped out from only a few hours of torrential rain. It was, to put it mildly, depressing.
The next morning, the rain seemed to become heavier. In Vermont the night before the temperature had soared to sixty degrees Fahrenheit. Certainly not typical November weather! After much discussion among the group that had gathered in Fort Kent, we decided to head for higher and snowier ground. West Yellowstone was the destination.
At five o'clock in the afternoon, I started back for Vermont, where I would catch a flight for Montana the next morning. On the road, I had a lot of time to think about how odd it had been that I was driving along the same route that I had just journeyed over the day before. The only things I was able to do while in Fort Kent was go for a two hour run and buy groceries at the store. It will stand as the longest grocery store trip of all time: 875 miles.
The next morning, I rushed to the airport to catch a flight to Cincinnati. The itinerary that we had booked was certainly not the most convenient one. I flew on three flights to get to Bozeman, Montana, while others had four flight segments. From Bozeman, we had a two-hour drive to our accommodations in West Yellowstone. Finally, I was asleep at two o'clock this morning.
My first day here has been surprisingly good. I have not felt to tired. Tim Burke, with whom I am sharing a room, and I went for a skate ski this morning. The temperatures were a little cold for the Toko yellow and red that we still had on our skis from the summer, but it was good to be back skiing. This afternoon, we followed up with a classic ski, in which we met a lot of various people that I had not seen for some time.
It will be a great week, and I hope to update you a bit more often than I have over the past two weeks. Traveling and finding snow have been rather time consuming.
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