Jack 8000

7 year old Jack surpassed 8,000 career skijor miles this morning! Impressive!

"And I have THOROUGHLY enjoyed EVERY mile of it!" states proud Jack.

Jack's skijor career to date is the following: 1042 days on the trails covering 8001.1 miles with 740,850 feet of elevation climbed! Consider that most of this happened since he was 1.5 years old and that is quite an impressive career he has strung together and continues. For the curious, younger Rudy is about 176 career miles behind Jack; so he should reach his 8000 career miles this season too :)

Now back to today's fun outing. With fresh snow, we decided to skijor the Sallie Barber Mine Trail. To our amazement, we were first tracks in the new snow on this popular trail:

First tracks in the 2-3 inches of fresh snow to start the outing.

As usual, we climbed to the mine to start the outing and, as usual, the silly kids had to stop, drop and roll snow angels to reward themselves for the initial climb:

Jack getting some serious powder flying around him as he rolls an angel
while Rudy is cooling himself gently.

Another note about Jack's career: he has rolled at least one snow angel on EVERY skijor outing of his life (and often more than one). That's 1042 straight outings rolling snow angels. He is such a snow rolling nut! Funny side story - when Jack was young he almost missed rolling a snow angel on one outing. I was skijoring with him and Zorro (Rudy was too young to come along yet) and made a final turn to return to the trailhead to complete the day. Jack had not yet rolled a snow angel on this particular outing. But, when he saw the trailhead (knowing we were about done), he realized he had not got his snow angel in yet. What did he do? Well, he dropped right in front of me to roll before ending the outing. I almost ran over the silly cracker Jack! Since that outing, Jack has NEVER come close to finishing a run without getting his snow angel roll registered :) 

Back to today, next we decided to skijor down and back up the backside of Sallie Barber Mine. What a great decision, it was magical on the backside! Come along and watch the fun in today's video highlight. After we round a right turn in the trail, watch the magic unfold as we get into an open straightaway with tons of wind blown snow drifts to blast through. So impressive to watch Jack & Rudy blast through powder!

[watch on youtube if no video loads below]

Here are some fun still shots from that video:

Blasting through a stretch of deep powder!

And another:

Powering through a powder cache along a slight rise in the trail. Fun!

After doing the backside of the mine trail, it was time to return down the front. As usual, Jack & Rudy always fly by the mine on pass two (versus rolling snow angels on pass one):

Zipping along in the tracks we set on the first pass by the mine.

Fun day with some surprise deep powder caches, right guys?

"Yes! We had a blast blasting through deep snow!" says the happy kids.

Today's tally: 7.3 miles traveled with 700 feet of elevation climbed with a top speed of 22 MPH and passing 8000 career skijor miles for impressive 7 year old Jack! Yay!

2024/2025 Season to Date: 79 days on the trails covering 619.2 miles with 58,800 feet of elevation climbed.