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S'no More!

By Jan Nesset

I'm not naming names but if you're anything like the person wearing my clothes you've allowed your skin to turn a pasty shade of translucent. Your skin is in dire need of a barrage of sun-blasted Vitamin E to bring it back around to a color associated with the living.

It's been a long winter, and depending on who you are that's either a good thing or a bad thing. I'm wishy washy, opting for some winters to stretch out and for others to call it quits early. This winter, early quits. Long winter, bad thing. Cold, snow, cold, cold, cold, snow, cold, snow, sunshine (really? - almost!), cold, cold, snow - it was repetitive enough to get me thinking about trading in my ski pass for a season's pass to a local pub just to stare past the babe on the poster to the beach and palm tree.

The last day of January, I paddled my kayak down a stretch of the Animas River, hoping to trigger a chaos-theory series of events to turn the tide on winter. Paddling was fun and different but, predictably, bumpy. The next day it snowed four inches, and I went skiing. In February, a friend announced a wish for two more months of winter, claiming a banner ski season. A smile masked the scowl welling in my frosted cheeks. In early March, when the trails in my area were prime for snowshoe stomping, I jumped on my mountain bike and rode a two-hour loop on the highway. The next day it snowed four inches. My six-year-old intentionally - and gleefully - skied black diamonds that day (letter writers: address correspondence to Mom). I felt so alone.

Now, in April, April showers bring May flowers. If this page could talk, it'd blab that I sang aloud that sentence as I wrote it (I omitted the tralalalalee!). I'm in the mood for spring. And for those readers who are paying attention, April is just another way to spell spring but with an "A" and an "l".

This issue is snowless. It's time to look ahead. While there are good days of spring skiing ahead, mostly backcountry stuff (bless each and every one of you still up there), the mountains are giving up on snow and raising creeks and rivers with snowmelt. Skis and snowshoes are giving over to paddles and oars, first in the desert where Arizona and New Mexico waterways flush early and fast. To catch them, we explore four rivers in this issue, the Colorado, Verde, San Francisco and Upper Gila, and one fast and furious creek, Oak Creek, a tributary of Arizona's Verde River.

Stay tuned! We're counting on open roads and trails for the May issue, which will be filled with mountain and road bike stories, including the skinny on whether you really beat the train when you rode the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic. We might uncover a truth that you didn't really want to know.