NAASF Telluride, CO February, 2022

After almost 3 straight weeks of snowstorms to finish December, we all had high hopes for the season snowpack, but it was not to be! January 2022 was one of the driest months ever recorded for the Rocky Mountains. We were all a bit concerned approaching our second NAASF event of the season in Telluride, CO! Luckily, Telluride – as it so often does – defied all the odds and ended up being a fantastic week of skiing and boarding! Thanks to the high elevation, we were treated to crisp, cold temperatures and firm corduroy every morning, clear blue skies all day, and incredibly beautiful alpenglow sunsets every evening. Outside of one windy day, we could not have asked for better conditions for the week.DSSC member Demian Brooks held what is becoming our favorite “Telluride Ski Week Pre-Game” event at his bar, the Lone Cone Saloon in Norwood, CO on Saturday. The pool tournament threatened to go into the wee hours of the morning as person after person kept failing to sink balls to keep things moving. After finally making it through the first two brackets, he thankfully cut it down to nine balls per rack to try to keep our embarrassment to a minimum! As always, it was a pretty raucous party, and the prime rib dinner was great!

Our members that have been coming to Telluride for the last 5 or 6 years got a bit of a surprise when it came to lodging this year! Many of the lodging companies in the area elected to simply roll over their 2020/2021 “COVID Cancellations” into 2022… with the unpleasant effect of creating an incredible scarcity of lodging choices! And in accordance with the laws of supply and demand, the prices for the remaining inventory of housing went through the roof. Some of the places we had been renting for $2,500/wk in previous years were well over $12,000!!! Even with 10 people in the condo, that’s a bit pricey! Through combinations of Air BnB, VRBO, and a lot of doubling up on beds, couches and sleeping bags, it seems like everyone found something that got them in the door, though.

While I have to believe this was a one-time issue of pent-up demand – we saw this everywhere we went this season – it certainly got the full attention of those of us attending more than one event this year. As a result of this anomaly, the very limited discounted lodging available through our NAASF group rates did not last long, and we ended up in a free-for-all finding accommodations through any means available. The upside of this was that many of us who had never stayed down in the town of Telluride (most of our NAASF lodging is usually up in the Mountain Village) got a new appreciation for what a cool place that old mining town really is!

Our Club Dinner was at our now-regular place, High Pie Pizzeria and Tap House. We were proud to present the first round of new club jackets to their new owners, and we got to meet new members Brian Akullian, Phil Casha, Jason Jones, Erin O’Shea, Tim Shankland, Melissa Sloan, and Charlie Yurick. It was also great to see Brenda Sheaffer and Mike Weber back after a long time away from the club!

The theme party this week was “Saloon Girls and Wild Men of the West” in honor of Telluride’s Old West mining town history, and people really stepped up their costume game for the party!

As the racing got underway in Telluride, it became obvious that Delta wasn’t the only team that had found a rash of new members with skills!! The Newcomer’s Race on Tuesday looked more like a World Cup race than a bunch of newbs trying to figure out the correct way to go around the gates in the course! I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that after watching the Newcomer’s Race, some of our members floated the idea of a bet with the AA Ski & Snowboard Club, which they readily accepted. The bet, like all good ski town bets eventually do, involved members of the losing club skiing naked with the winning club’s banner at the next ski week. The stakes on the racing for the week just went way, way up!  An incredible combination of new “ringers” battling it out on the course and “old hands” turning in some amazing performances (with some notable exceptions – we’re looking at you, Are Johnsen!) showed us that this season was going to mean that EVERY individual performance was going to have a potential impact on the outcome of the season. A lot of us remembered, THIS is why we love to race so much! We had great fun cheering the return to racing of Pat Hadley, Debra Main, Joe Pagano, Brenda Sheaffer, Rob Mastic, and Bobby Bell. It was also exciting to see long-time snowboarder Lesli Tomasini not only ski race for the first time, but also do it on the steepest hill she has ever skied on!!

The end result was one of the most competitive races we’ve seen in years, with AA just BARELY edging Delta out of the lead – 1208 to 1206!! United ended up in third with 617 points, so you can see how AA and Delta had really pulled out all the stops! We would be moving on to our last event in Palisades Tahoe with everything on the line!