TAOS New Mexico....BETA.....?

[Meadow Skipper]

heh...here's some more beta

Long vid - I had to leave off last night and come back to that today, but it's awesome.

this movie scares me. i'd much rather have remained oblivious and enjoying the bits of mesa that i had access to. that settles it, pagosa springs is my future vacation home, not taos.

Just stay east of the gorge.

haha

Chimayo represent.

Where's telepop?

Welcome back skieurmalade/joey. Truchas plans are being laid.

[f2f]

Just stay east of the gorge.

always have, except the areas around 285 which are just scary in a horror movie kind of way

my favourite place from the whole area remains the Pecos wilderness. there i felt like i was back home, in a temperate climate with water...

you would be amazed at how often we mention the NM sun even after 4 years away from the place...

[raisingarizona13]

I have seen a few pics of the terrain surrounding the ski area there and it looks pretty good so what's up with bc touring there?

[raisingarizona13]

Is Taos anything like Gallup? I just spent 7 days in Gallup and that place is kinda fucked!

[up an down]

(thread drift) What's a part-time ski bum?

..the years i was at taos i saved enough $ each year farming that i didn't have to work in the winter, unlike the cottamites..... i guess a part timer has to work in the winter, a full timer doesn't.

[Tech Tonics]

I think taos kicks-ass. sure, it's hit-or-miss with the storms, but it's what I'll miss most about NM...other than the great folks down there.

it has a great feeling to it....a remarkably mellow vibe. big powder days go off and (for me) it's all about hiking. less than 15 minutes walking gets you to great terrain that is steeper and more technical than almost anywhere.

my purgatory (ugh) pass has a few tsv days on it, so I'll be coming down there for a good storm cycle this winter.

Definitely follow iceman's advice and go to Petaca and ask in a big white-person voice where you can buy chains and where the golf resort is. they'll love you. someone in an old taos thread said "they keep it really real in petaca".

and no. Taos is not like gallup.
it has mountains.

[Meadow Skipper]

I have seen a few pics of the terrain surrounding the ski area there and it looks pretty good so what's up with bc touring there?

Pretty much just stuff like this, I'm told it's much better in Colorado:



What ever happened to ^Artie Fufkin? Haven't seen him for a while.

Is Taos anything like Gallup? I just spent 7 days in Gallup and that place is kinda fucked!

You can't tell the difference in the dark.

[telepop]

Chimayo has really good Red Chili. Jason Snowhawk is that you Yetiman?

[raisingarizona13]

Dang, looks sweet! Coolies and big open faces! What else could ya want? We have some fun lines here in Flag but most of em are shorter or at least the real steep ones are.

[MJbumper1121]

Taos is amazing. Plain and simple. I am envious that it is your home mountain! Enjoy!

[ill-advised strategy]

cottamites.....

Once upon a hazy night at the T-bird I myself coined that phrase. I snatched it right from the smokey ether.

This is the TSV I remember:



I remember Brian Swinson, Sean Cisneros, Marty Lucero, Josh Carlson, Gabe and hugh. I remember that guy who rode his motorcycle to work at the ski valley every day all winter...running the car snow tire and a sidecar. I remember the Stagg's dog Sundancer running around the ski valley unchecked. I remember skiing moguls with Dean Cummings back when he used to still ski at Taos. I remember Mickey Blake passing like 20 cars in one shot with his grey mustang on the ski valley road. I remember going on dates with Catherine Peralta when her dad was the mayor. I remember the first TSV Marshall who was cool as shit and would wave at me as I did 100mph through amizette on my motorcycle.

Taos in a nutshell, in one story: At the end of ski season, the cigar-smoking middle aged woman who managed the condos above Terry Sports moved out of this decrepit A-Frame in the ski valley. I was receiving this class-action settlement from Quest because they refused to install more phone lines for a house I had tried to buy in Questa (for $50,000...which seemed really expensive compared to the places I was looking at in Tres Piedras and on the mesa) for about $200/month. The house was normally unoccupied in the summer, so I worked out a deal with the guy who "managed" that rental house to rent it for $200/month off the books, so I had a free house basically, and he had some cashflow. That year I had a lot of friends in and around the ski valley, coming and going, and there was some chaos with people changing houses and roommates and the usual, so I had a few people staying with me at the house and I had this big white board in the house because I had a phone and all kinds of people needed a phone to get messages or apply for a job or you name it so I would tell them to use my number. I'd get calls for people, take a message and put it on the big white board. That way people were always coming by and that was nice and when I wasn't home there was always somebody coming by to check on my dog and the place wasn't unoccupied. Sometime in the middle of the summer when I was out on a fire, the guy who'd made that deal with me quit his job, didn't mention anything about me to anyone, and his replacement came up the valley to look at this supposedly vacant house. She saw the white board full of messages for like 15 different people, saw my 3 motorcycles out front and 20 pairs of skis in the house and she freaked out thinking there was some huge number of people squatting in the house...so she started an eviction process. So I had to leave a fire camp in Raton NM every night for a few days, drive back to Taos Ski Valley, and start moving my shit out. I moved everything I could into a storage unit, my buddy who was camping/squatting on some guy's property in Valdez took my dog, my spare 1980 Subaru, and one of my 3 motorcycles. Another guy in Angel Fire who bartended with my girlfriend offered to take another motorcycle in his garage. I just camped and stayed in fire camps for the rest of the summer with my shit spread around everywhere. Having to track people down in person because nobody had cell phones back then. Fucking amazing. Anyway, the guy who took the spare car basically kept it. He apparently decided to be gay with this guy whose mom owned the El Salto Ski Lodge and they moved to Albuquerque to engage in buggery with this dude...and never paid me a dime for the car, but I was so grateful for his having taken care of my dog that I had to let it go. The guy who took my motorcycle let his girlfriend try to learn to ride on it, and when she crashed the bike in Guadalupita, they just took her straight to the hospital and left the bike on the side of the road. Somebody stole it, and when I finally got this all figured out I went to the Mora county sheriffs dept and the duty officer laughed at me and said "you're not getting it back, might as well not waste my time"...again, had to let it go.
I felt somewhat vindicated, or that the karmic scales had been evened because in the next few years I found a free subaru that my friend had abandoned and rallied the living shit-hell out of it for a good year with no license plates and having zero regard for any maintenance or upkeep of any kind....then a guy from Carson traded my 1982 suzuki GS850 for an awesome, legit, gangster chopper from the 1970s. It was a basket case 1972 T120R in an Amen frame with huge forks. There were a few bullet marks on the frame and oil tank, the guy said it came from a guy who came up to Carson after the Arizona Dirty Dozen were absorbed into the Hells Angels and he told me he would only sell me the bike if I agreed to paint it red.

That pretty much sums up my experiences of living in Taos in a nutshell. It's not a normal place.

[ill-advised strategy]

So there I was, back in Taos after living in Salt Lake for 5 years. I ended up hooking up with this woman in Talpa who was a horse trainer. She was pretty nice, and she had cool dogs and a nice place to live, so hanging out was enjoyable.
Highlights:
1) She had some sort of strange lack of sexual technique where she basically wanted to do some thing that just wasn't really possible, so she'd always go for it but it didn't work. I can't really describe this, except to say that I think it may have been some orgasm reflex she developed from all that horseback riding. It was truly obnoxious and totally ineffective.
2) This bitch had gonnorhea. God dammit.
3) I think a major reason she dated me was so that I would deal with the mentally ill hispano man who was sort of combination stalking/robbing her out in Talpa. I ended up talking to some locals on the fire crew and had them tell him that I would shoot him in the face if I saw him around the house. The burglaries stopped.
4) One night she was telling me about this time things got out of hand partying in North Carolina and she got committed to a mental institution. It turns out it was in the same relatively small town as my buddy from Helitack grew up. I couldn't even wait until a reasonable hour to call him, as soon as I was driving out of her driveway the next morning I was on the phone to DJ and just about crashed we were laughing so hard. Yes, I just banged a mental patient from your hometown. Yeah yeah dude, seriously.

[grskier]

Once upon a hazy night at the T-bird I myself coined that phrase. I snatched it right from the smokey ether.



I remember Brian Swinson, Sean Cisneros, Marty Lucero, Josh Carlson, Gabe and hugh. I remember that guy who rode his motorcycle to work at the ski valley every day all wi

That pretty much sums up my experiences of living in Taos in a nutshell. It's not a normal place.

Nice little write up... I went to Taos to visit my sister and ski every spring break in the late 90s and skied with Brian and Sean a few times. I then moved to Denver and headed down every chance I got. I don't get down nearly enough now a days, but I've had some of my best powder days ever at Taos.... and I sucked at skiing pow then. We'll probably go down the next long weekend chance we get, likely in early 2012

[ill-advised strategy]

oh was that too much ....BETA.....?

My bad.

[ill-advised strategy]

Chimayo has really good Red Chili. Jason Snowhawk is that you Yetiman?

Jesus Fucking Christ no I'm not snowchicken.

[telepop]

Thank goodness Yetiman, snowchicken? I would have went with "Danger Boy". Gabe is my brother in law and thinking we probably know each other somehow. I think the OP made a good choice to give Taos a try, if one can make it there they can make it anywhere and the skiing is first class with little pretense.

[ill-advised strategy]

heh...in hindsight though, I think a lot of that danger boy shit was because he was on short fat skis and wearing a helmet way before anybody else back when everyone thought that shit was queer.

Sure he was crazy... but you gotta admit he was onto something.

[telepop]

He was on to something. Definately went for it but a lot of times was beyond his skill level but we probably all were at some point. Good skiers in Taos.

[raisingarizona13]

I think Taos sounds pretty reasonable, go check out Gallup. That place is FUCKED!!!!!!! Sorry about your clap Yetiman.

[ill-advised strategy]

I think Taos sounds pretty reasonable, go check out Gallup. That place is FUCKED!!!!!!! Sorry about your clap Yetiman.

Yeah, my sister taught elementary school in Gallup...rough town.

Re: clap. At the time I was tentatively planning on jumping off the gorge bridge, so I wasn't really as cautious as I should have been with such a foul specimen. Could've been better, could've been worse.

[mtngirl79]

You need to write a book, YM...

Seriously, just do it..

[ill-advised strategy]

When Tresckow and Woodsy first showed me this forum I came to see it as a replacement for the magazines. It became my ski magazine, and I decided to make a point of trying to make it good...because I don't have a degree, I'm not going to get the Powder magazine internship, I'm not a professional at that business....but at least we can be funny and bullshit on the internet and hopefully the bullshit is more good than bad.

Powder magazine came and had their conference at my old job and they asked the other guy I worked with to write something for them and never even said one word to me about it....so I'm not going to get to write for them. I get to write here. This is my place to do what I do. If it's good, that makes me happy. If it's not, at least I don't have to feel badly because I'm not getting paid for it.

I really don't have anything to write a book about. I read Spats' book and it was so awesome, and I can't even begin to imagine putting something like that together. The only 2 ideas I ever really had don't have any kind of cohesion at all, and in my head they seem like movies instead of books, with music.

[mtngirl79]

Everything you write here is insanely entertaining...

It reads almost like excerpts from a Jack kerouac book... It's something about your ability to describe things, and get to the truth of the situation. Its hard to describe, but you really are talented..

Working on fire crews and ski bumming is actually pretty interesting to a lot of people...

[My Pet Powder Goat]

Yeti kills it.

Mtngirl moves to Gallup, gets clap.

[BrianH]

When I was new in NM, a gaggle of East Coast folx came out and we tried to stay in some condo in TSV. We had too many and when one complained that the hottub was too cold, the owner of the joint called the sheriff. Since the sheriff was banging her, he supervised while she kicked us out.

Welcome to NM brah, it's a total slacker's paradise!