Welcome to Colorado, where we groom 100,000 miles of snowmobiles every day!

While the Mineral Belt sits under 30 inches of snow, Turquoise Lake was groomed by the snowmobile club’s $2.5 million (not an actual figure) Pisten Bully last night, creating a wide, firm skate deck for one intrepid skier on Thanksgiving morning.

Ajee and I set out on the sandpaper slow snow for a little 15-mile circumnavigation of Leadville’s lake…a real “Turkey day Tour de Turq.”

It was very cold this morning, but I can confirm that underneath my Sporthill longsleeve and a hooded vest, I started to sweat quite a bit by the halfway mark.

In other grooming news, CMC has been rolled as of 9 a.m. Thursday morning. Hopefully, they’ll bust out the groomer soon. I’m getting a little tired of double-poling down our unplowed residential roads, as I did for the last couple of days….

For those in great SederSkier nation, consider becoming a GripWax Nation member today!

If you were member, you would have been delighted to several stories this week, like a huge U.S. Ski Team preview (which was the first pre-Ruka preview posted on any Nordic website, btw), a feature on Haley Brewster, a Q/A with University of Vermont coach and 2x Olympian Patrick Weaver and a story on the German team in advance of the Ruka World Cup opener.

Keep on striving.

Keep on skiing.