My Favorite Halloween Tradition: Skiing!

I went cross-country skiing on Saturday. It was my fifth ski day of the new season, which is a welcome change after last year’s abysmal snowfall. We have another storm underway and with any luck, we should have some packed trails this week. Saturday also happened to be Halloween. I think of Halloween skiing as a Grand Mesa tradition, and since I’m a data nerd I have numbers to prove it. I am not one of those people who use Strava or religiously track kilometers skied or training numbers, but I do have records of the date of my first ski since 2013. I’ve pieced these dates together from my minimal training logs and (mostly) photographs. My first ski days (all on the Grand Mesa)2026: October 142025: Nov 17 (some of my friends got their first ski on the Grand Mesa on Oct 24, but the snow didn’t last to Halloween)2024: October 292023: October 132022: October 242021: October 132020: October 272019: October 312018: October 212017: November 182016: November 182015: October 222014: November…