At last year’s Burro Fest the emcees described Mancos as a community where art, adventure, and agriculture intersect. It’s the truest statement I’ve heard about this pocket of the world. The exposure to new types of adventure are bountiful. Since we’ve discovered Mancos we’ve also discovered cross country skiing, downhill skiing, snowshoeing, mountain biking, none of which we’d ever done three years ago.
Now, I suck at downhill skiing. Like, I’m really, really bad at it and have spent the precious hours we’ve had on the mountain on the magic carpet, the area designed for kids getting their bearing on skis. And me. After a full day of pricey lessons, I did get successfully down the magic carpet hill a few times. This isn’t impressive. By the time I had down that Zak and the girls were going down real mountains on the more challenging trails. But my instructor thought that I was ready for the bunny hill since I had down such a great job on the entire descent of the magic carpet (an elevation loss of about 5 feet over 30 yards or so.) Ha! Cute. He was wrong, I wasn’t ready. He had to go down the hill backwards right in front of me while I held onto his arms. The whole way down. I am not a downhill skier by nature.
During spring break, the day after the torturous skiing situation, we rented mountain bikes and headed to Phil’s World. I found biking to be so enjoyable. By nature, I am not an athletic person. (See above story about skiing.) But biking! I found enough confidence to be successful. I loved every second, even the grueling ones. It was what I found myself dreaming about for weeks after.
We headed back to Phil’s World today and my love of the sport was confirmed again. It’s so wild, the ups and downs, the dodging of rocks, roots, and shrubs, the exhaustion immediately followed by exhilaration. Ellie had had a tough experience at spring break. She had forgotten what hand controled the rear break, used her front break as she was going down a hill, flipped over the handle bars, ripping her newly pierced nose stud out. Her bruises and nose healed fine, but she was traumatized by the experience. She and I rode together for most of the ride today and what fun it was to see her regroup and rock the ride. It was a pretty epic first ride of the summer.
