I’m getting so excited for next weekend! Leadville plays host to ski joring, a throwback to days in Scandinavia when people would get pulled to town on their skis by reindeer. Today’s courses are a little bit more exciting, though, and Leadville’s course is especially exciting since it is a non-sanctioned race and being non-sanctioned, they can do pretty much whatever they want. Like hold the event on Leadville’s main drag, Harrison Ave. The buildings are tall and frame the street nicely, the spectators stand behind fencing mere feet from the athletes, and if you happen to slide into a lightpost, well….
So, one skier and one horse and rider get paired together. The rider rides their horse blazingly fast down the middle of the street (that is covered in a thick layer of imported snow). The skier (whose arm is wrapped in a rope trailing from the galloping horse) navigates tight turns, magnificent jumps (all the while eating snow that is flung into their face from the horse’s back hooves) and has to stay focused enough to collect six or seven hanging rings along the way. Of course the whole thing is timed, and to add to the pressure, bystanders are allowed to bet on your team.
So, if this doesn’t sound like fun, I’m not sure what would. If you really want to get a feeling for what this is like, this link will take you to a 12 minute video documentary on the event.
My favorite part about ski joring is the family-like qualities that all the competitors possess towards one another. They take care of each other like brethren. The riders really love and care for their animals well. The skiers love their side of the bargain, tearing down main street and going huge off the jumps. Ski Joring is a marvelous harmony of two seemingly disconnected events.
The boys had a slightly rougher go of things and the Salida crowd left with grins on their faces. 
And the pep band played on… 
The slog through the unusual amount of snow around Turtle Rocks was worth it. We parked out by the road and made our way through the deep snow around the pinon trees (my choice to wear tennis shoes and cotton socks that morning clearly was made without thought of the rest of the day) towards the rocks. In the summer, you can find the roads through the trees full of the cars of rock climbers, hikers, naturalists and off-roaders. The warm wind sweeps down the Arkansas River and up the broad face of granite. You can generally see rafters floating by, running the narrows.
I want to thank Edward Burtynsky for his profound view of the waste that we create and the energy that we consume. His piece, Manufactured Landscapes, affected me deeply, causing me to truly consider my life and realize that most every luxury and comfort that I experience is provided for by someone doing something to offset it in a faraway place. The computer that I’m typing on at the moment will someday become e waste and be shipped to a small village in China where people will heat the mother board to remove any valuable metals. The people of the village will then import water because the pollution in the rivers from the piles of broken computers makes local water undrinkable. All the while, I will be enjoying my brand new computer that is oh-so-much sweeter than the previous. Now I can keep in touch with my friends on Facebook even easier (because my new processor is so much faster). We are not thinking this through. Because all of our waste is out of sight, we are not caused to think about our decisions any farther than we can see. Mr. Burtynsky presents a view of this process through his beautiful photography of waste sites and energy sources.