It's Saturday now, but I'm thinking back to Friday.

Friday was a good day. I got up wanting to go cross country skiing. So, late in the morning, I drove up to the Old Monarch Pass road about a mile short of Highway 50's Monarch Pass summit. I didn't know how well the Prius would handle snow on the parking area, so I parked with some care. There would be no problem later. The Prius sure does climb mountains well!

Only skied for about 20 minutes, but it felt really great. The route through the deep snow which lies at angles against the tree trunks is very nice. I could have gone on for another mile or two, but not very many others were there and nobody knew where I was. So I made it short.

I drove about a mile down the mountain to the Monarch Ski Area, where Anrahyah was surprised to see me! Having eaten already, she had a few spoonfuls of my chili and we had a pleasant talk. She was there because her charter school goes skiing every Friday. It's a fine day when I can go skiing and also have lunch with my girlfriend!

Home again, I fit together a bunch of digital topo maps into one of three huge map files. From this, I'll extract the map files that will become map pages in Arkansas River Guide. Fitting these individual digital quadrangles together is exacting Photoshop work (the edges don't exactly match), and you end up with as many layers as you had quadrangle maps. I saved that image (which was about 2.5 GB), then flattened the layers and saved it again. Then I backed it up--not gonna have to do this work twice!

Still no snow here on the valley floor. But the Arkansas drainage is in good shape. Drive over one of the passes north of Leadville, and the snow is very impressive!Drive south or southwest from here, and it's a much different story. The San Juan Mountains in SW Colorado are really hurting and so, therefore, will be the San Juan River. I have a river trip permit application in for that river, in June.