Yowsa!!! 1 [1]
At last, some honest to goodness Yowsa! I was beginning to think it was never going to happen, Without Yowsa!, there really isn't much point being in Laramie for the 6 winter months of the year.
Note
Woke up this morning, looked outside, and was surprised to see snow had fallen during the night. Excellent!
I was surprised because before going to bed, the skies had been dark. Around here, the skies almost always take on a pinkish glow to the SW (lights from town) before it starts snowing and while it is snowing.
Later in the morning it started snowing again, and it snowed at a steady, light rate all day long. The best thing was that after eight days of nearly incessant wind, today the gods of wind took the day off, and so the snow was falling straight down--exactly what was needed to patch up scoured parts of the trail net.
I went up skiing in the mid-afternoon, and it was so nice to at last have some nice snow on trails again and not have an accompanying amount of treefall that I skied well past nightfall and skipped running. There was very thin cloud cover and so while you couldn't see any stars, enough of the moon was seeping through that the lighting was quite good, and way more than I needed for skiing (map reading, on the other hand, would have been a problem!) It was such a nice time to be out. The clouds weren't touching the ground, but looked so low and thin that my guess is that if the trails were just another 500' higher or so, then maybe they would have been above the clouds, with a clear shot at the moon and nearby Venus. (The elevation of the ski trails is a little less than 9000', and so high enough that sometimes it seems like you can feel the thin air if you're working hard enough.)
As I was finishing up running Saturday night and approaching the parking lot, I was surprised to see a group of people had shown up and were out stringing up lights on small fir trees. It seemed odd, so many days after Christmas, and to be doing it then, the 31st--plus I'd never seen anyone doing something like this up there before--but the lights were quite pretty.
Tonight I saw the lights were still up. They really add a surprisingly nice bit of atmosphere to the place after dark. I have no idea how they're powered--maybe batteries, maybe solar + batteries?
Normally the place is just dark at night, except for whatever headlamps skiers might have on, or from bike lights. There's no electricity up there and therefore no lighting otherwise.