John Mahar's Blog

Education, Spanish, Travel, Poems, Bonnaroo reports, and more.

Sunday, April 20, 2008


Just got back from Colorado. Aside from a few troubles with the TSA, things went well. I saw muchos amigos. I saw Climax, the molebdenum mine. It had a fresh foot of snow on its pristine roofs. I got to ski. I got to climb. I got to imbibe with friends. I had an argument over spanish language pedagogy. And, among other things, Dave Gafner told me "I did something kind of stupid the other day." It was with highly pressurized air. On his leg. Ouch. Josh was mainly the one with TSA problems. He kept joking about hiding illicit materials on (rather, in) his person, and, well, they responded appropriately. Not pretty doesn't do it justice. Today I got back to home, to find, right next to the bat poop, a receipt from ORKIN. They do good work, haha.
IN THE PHOTO you see Dan and I. His dog Cleo was with us, but she is too short to be in our self-portrait. The mountains in the back are somewhere west of twin lakes towards independence pass. we did some back-country skiing. Josh was with us, after some equipment troubles and generosity from Chris Barlow, but I did not teach him how to slide the skis, so he was just walking with leg weights for the two mile approach to the actual uphill part. Needless to say, his motor was spent. "DEAD," he called out to us from behind in his typically sparse verse. Dan and I continued and had a nice ski on some pretty hard snow. Fast turns got us down in about 10 minutes what had taken an hour to ski up. But the ski up was most of the fun. That night we got a foot of snow. But Josh and I had to go on to Boulder the next day. Luck.