January 7, 2006: First day in Crested Butte.

Crested Butte turned out to be what I expected it to be. That said, it still got me excited beyond reason. And that's after we had to endure

• an emergency landing in Madison, Wisconsin during our flight to Denver;
• 5+ hour drive from Denver to Crested Butte, on less than ideal Colorado mountain roads;
• an hour long check-in at the hotel, complete with two attempts to get us into rooms with people already sleeping in them;
• (get this!) two unsuspiciously looking TV sets in the room, neither of which had the necessary connectors for us to plug the Xbox into (that was a tragedy).

Crested Butte is (a) nice-looking (for the most part, anyway) little town in the middle of nowhere (and actually in the middle of Colorado, too), and (b) a ski area about 3 miles from the said town, technically located beside the ski village named Mount Crested Butte.

When we entered the town around midnight on January 7, the downtown Crested Butte was sporting a lone coyote patiently waiting on an intersection for us to pass by. That really impressed us, even after we spent the last 50 miles of our drive maneuvering around deers who stand on Gunnison county roads in the same way and in about the same numbers as snowboarders sit on an average Mount Sunapee trail. Now, I have seen coyotes standing on a road. That was, however, in Yosemite National Park, which, while crowded, is still a reasonably wild place. But this one was in a town, complete with streets, shiny shop windows and christmas lights.

And then was the long-awaited sleep.

And then we woke up and saw this:

And when we did our first run, we realized they actually have snow (and not ice) for us to ski on:

Then we looked around and saw this:

... and this:

... and this:

... and this:

The airline, bad luck and even the hotel were forgiven.

Then we did this:

and a little bit of this:

And the Patriots won to cap the day. By the way, people in Colorado are really unbelievably nice. I already learned to expect this whenever landing anywhere between California and New England, but it still amazes me. That said, while nice overall, they root for the Broncos.

And in case anyone reading this forgot or never knew how we look, here is Oleg:

...and this would be me: