CRMS teams gear up for 24 Hours of Sunlight

GLENWOOD SPRINGS — One by one they piled out of the Colorado Rocky Mountain School bus at a parking lot near Williams Peak, next to Sunlight Mountain Resort.

Slapping skins on their skis or splitboards and strapping on backpacks and beacons, the 12 high schoolers and their five coaches disappeared into the trees.

It’s all part of the training for the CRMS Off-Piste teams, but this journey has a particular focus — to get ready for Saturday and Sunday’s 24 Hours of Sunlight race.

CRMS will enter three teams of five, which almost equals 10 percent of the school’s student body, in the third annual marathon ski/snowboard/skin/snowshoe race, which

will begin at 11 a.m. on Saturday at Sunlight.

“I think we will be ready on Saturday — after (trainings) today, Wednesday and

Thursday,” said Off-Piste coach Darryl Fuller. “I think we are 90 percent right now.”

The trio of teams, which consists of two skiing squads and one snowboard/splitboard

team, make up a small fraction of the 77 teams or individuals who had signed up for

the event as of Tuesday. Like all the teams or brave soloists, CRMS has been

training for a long time to prepare for this weekend.

“We come up here, we ski Snowmass, hike the Highlands Bowl, we did COSMIC

(Colorado Ski Mountaineering Cup), we do Nordic skiing,” said Nick Malik, a junior in

his first year at CRMS.

Competing in COSMIC, a shorter backcountry race at Sunlight on Jan. 20, gave the

CRMS snow athletes a taste of what this weekend has to offer. While 24 Hours of

Sunlight is on groomed trails, involving skinning or snowshoeing up and then skiing

or snowshoeing down a 1 mile, 1,898-foot-vertical course, it involves the some of the same concepts that COSMIC did.

“It gives you an idea of what’s ahead,” said CRMS junior Ellie McKinley.

McKinley is a captain of one of CRMS’ ski teams and after growing up in Glenwood Springs, has spent a lot of time on the slopes at Sunlight. Of course, it’s never been

24 consecutive hours.

“I am a little excited, a little nervous. I am excited for afterwards, when I can say I did

it,” she said on Tuesday.

The CRMS squads and their coaches will be using a slopeside condo for base camp,

where they will rotate in and out and see how many laps they can track. They are still

deciding on strategies and are still working out their goals.

“Mostly we’re just going to have fun,” Fuller said. “We’ll set some individual goals.

There will be challenges like the prolonged racing, figuring the rotations and the

potential of racing uphill and getting up in the middle of the night’s also going to present a challenge.”

The teams will be taking it easy on Friday and will try to get a good night’s sleep before setting out on a very long day on Saturday.