Beyond the Paintbrush Divide: Winter Update!

It's been a few months since the last post, but we have been enjoying that start of 2015. Here's what we have been up to so far. First, we wrapped up the holidays and Cassie was able to take her hat off.

Then we took advantage of some fresh snow and got out cross country skiing and snow shoeing. As cold as this winter has been, there hasn't been too much snow around here.

Cross country skiing!

Snow shoeing! Cassie has her shoes on too!

Early in January, I had a work conference in New Orleans and Diana took some time off to come down for a little vacation. It was warmer than Wisconsin, but still chilly. We went down a few days early to visit our friends Burke and Carolyn who live south of New Orleans in Houma. We enjoyed some of the local sites and had some great food.

Eating some beignets from Cafe Du Monde!

Relaxing in the Carousel Bar

Listening to some local musicians

At the end of January, I met up with my dad in Colorado for a week of skiing. We stayed at Breckenridge for the week and ventured out to Vail for one day. It was nice to get in some big mountain skiing compared to what is available in Wisconsin. We skied for seven days straight and logged just over 150 runs and 200,000 vertical feet. On our last day of skiing we had about 10 inches of fresh snow, which was a lot of fun.

Picture after hiking to the summit at 13,000 ft

View from the summit

One of the snow sculptures from international competition. This started from a 12 ft square block of snow.

Here is a video of Dad skiing though the powder:

And here is a video of me:

Into February, we took some time to add decorations to the walls in the basement. Diana used her creativity to make a foam-backed map in a frame so we could pin all of the places in the country we have been. Then we added a set of "ranger naturalist service" posters of natural parks we have been to (except for the everglades poster, we haven't been there but liked the way the poster looked).