Colorado Springs USHPA Board Meeting

 20 Mar - 1 April 2012

This time it's me who has volunteered to serve as a committee chair and thus have to attend the semi-annual board of directors meeting in Colorado Springs. We decided to drive instead of fly so that my travel reimbursement will just about cover our expenses. And, to make the trip worth the long drive, we booked five nights at a Wyndham timeshare resort in Pagosa Springs, CO, for after the BOD. This time we did not even bring our wings, but we did bring along hiking and xc-skiing/snowshoeing gear.

20 Mar, Tues – Left around 0730 and drove through a good snowstorm on Snoqualmie Pass, gas in Union Gap.  There was a bit more snow as we crossed the Blue Mountains. Gas at Costco Nampa and then on through Boise to overnight in Twin Falls at a Super8 motel. We went to Costco for gas and a sundae after a dinner of ham sandwiches brought from home.

21 Mar, Wed – The motel had a decent breakfast (there was even protein (!) - in the form of hard-boiled eggs) then we were on our way over Sweetzer Summit and down into Utah where we stopped for gas at Costco Ogden. Weather stayed good as we drove across Wyoming reaching Laramie around 1700.  C.J. worked on editing while I went out to get a headset at Walmart so I could arrange a Skype connection with John Dickenson, the Australian recipient of the Presidential Citation. Gas was relatively cheap at an Exxon station at $3.299. I also picked up a Little Caesar’s pizza for dinner in the Super8 motel.

22 Mar, Thu – No blizzards this year. Although it was 21 deg when we got up, the temperature climbed steadily all day into the low 60’s by the time we reached Colorado Springs. Since there was nothing we had to do (I wasn’t required to attend the training session for new directors), we took Robin Jones’s suggestion to check out the town of Manitou Springs, only a few miles west of CoSp. We stopped in the visitors’ center and found out about the seven local springs and picked up a couple of small plastic cups for sampling the water.  We ate lunch in one of the parks, then walked around town to all the springs and finally stopped for a really good frozen custard Girl Scout cookie mint “avalanche”. Back at the Antlers Hilton Hotel, we parked in the garage and attended the first general session of the board of directors meeting. The Ice Breaker was held at Springs Orleans, a restaurant on Pikes Peak Ave. All the directors and guests crowded into the upstairs room.  There were snacks and sliders and a cash bar. C.J. and I stayed for an hour or two before heading back to our motel. We had already checked into the LaQuinta Inn (north) on Garden of the Gods Blvd .

23 Mar, Fri – C.J. and I met with Jeff Mosher and Terry Rank, both USHPA office employees, as the Awards Committee from 0800-1000. C.J. took minutes and later I put the notes into the required report form.  We had lunch at the hotel (Judge Baldwin’s) with Tim Herr and Terry Rank – a working lunch so to say.  Later I mostly hung out and C.J. spent some time with the Publications Committee. After a visit to the USHPA office building, we had dinner with Martin, Mark F, Rich Hass, Margit (from Canada) and others at Il Vicino, an excellent little Italian restaurant on Tejon St. We shared a calzone and a salad and one of their own beers.

24 Mar, Sat – All day was devoted to general session. Along with the other committee chairmen, I presented my report. There was much more business at the general session most of it dealing with the insurance problem and the steps being taken to alleviate some of the safety concerns. We took a break at noon to have our traditional ice cream lunch with Mark Forbes. Around 1600 C.J. and I went back to the motel to change for the awards banquet. We got to The Warehouse (25 W Cimarron)  in time to help set up the tables for the awards and the computer, screen and projector with Terry and her husband Jim, Jeff M, Robin Jones and Eric, the IT guy. After we gulped down our dinner (served 30 min later than the plan) I emcee-d the awards presentation with C.J. doing a good imitation of Vanna White. Rich H presented the last two awards – The Presidential Citations and I followed up by connecting by Skype to John Dickenson in Australia so he could make his acceptance speech. It worked surprisingly well with small powered speakers plugged into my audio outlet. C.J. and I were among the last out at just after 2200.

25 Mar, Sun – After a stop at Costco for gas, C.J. and I headed south on CR115 then west on 50 along the Arkansas River. We made a brief stop at a tourist info place near Royal Gorge (which I had visited back in 1960 (?) on my way to Philmont). Admission now is expensive so we skipped the suspension bridge, gorge, train ride, cable car, etc. We turned south again after passing through Salida and had lunch in a city park in Saguache. At Wolf Creek Pass we stopped at the ski area to ask about xc-skiing. It was windy but not very cold even at 10,000ft. We got into Pagosa Springs by 1500 and checked into the Wyndham resort which is in “uptown”, about 3 ½ miles west of the downtown where the springs are. At 1800 we walked over to the activities center for a presentation on various activities and eating places. I guess at this time of year usually there is quite a bit of snow on the ground. There were a few piles below the steeply-pitched roofs, but that was it until you drove toward the pass and up a couple of thousand feet above the 7100ft valley floor.

26 Mar, Mon – We had one of those timeshare presentations at 0830 and scored a $50 debit card and some discounts. Back at the condo, we packed up for a ski tour and drove the 25 miles to the pass. It was very windy with some gusts threatening to knock us over so it may not have been the best choice of locations. The snow was very much “spring conditions” with the sun melting the surface enough to allow us to make tracks in the otherwise frozen surface, We were the only people on the Lobo Overlook winter trail and we didn’t get much more than 1 ½ -2 miles up the trail before deciding that the wind and decreasing temperature were just too much. We had lunch and started down. The descent was not as bad as we had feared and we made it without falling at all. On the way back to the condo, we stopped to walk up to Treasure Falls, and drove into downtown Pagosa Springs to see the springs themselves – not much to see from the outside. The strong winds had carried dust into the sky and the mountains were barely visible. On the way home we stopped for groceries at City Market.  It was good to get home and put our feet up; we were seriously tired.

27 Mar, Tues – After breakfast we got packed up for another trip and, on the way out dropped in to the resort office to see if they could do something about our phone which had no dial tone. We stopped in Pagosa Springs to ask the Forest Service about hiking and x-c skiing. He recommended the same hike the woman at Alpen Haus had: Chimney Rock, a set of Indian ruins about a three-mile walk beyond a locked gate. C.J. scored some new Smokey Bear goodies including a bandana. We drove out of town 19 miles to a parking area for USFS road 39 (Fall Creek Rd) at 9600 ft.  There was plenty of snow although it was seriously dusted with grit and somewhat chewed up by the snowmobile traffic since the snow last Sunday.  We climbed slowly, cutting a few switchbacks, to a good lunch spot at 1.6 mi (I had brought along the car GPS). From there we continued up more switchbacks until we reached the 5 km marker (10,400ft) around 1420 and turned around for a slow ski back down to the car (1520). It was a much nicer expedition than the cold and windy trip the previous day. On the way back we stopped to get gas ($3.79, up .04 since Monday) and a loaf of bread at City Market. After dinner we soaked in the hot tub attached to the condo section we are in.

28 Mar, Wed – We got out a little earlier and it wasn’t such a long drive to the base of Chimney Rock. As expected, the gate was locked to keep out motor vehicles.  The only other vehicle in the small lot was a mountain biker who told us about a trail that followed the top of the cliff band so that we would not have to walk the whole three miles on the gravel road. It was another beautiful, sunny day (but, just like yesterday, there had been frost in the early morning) and it was already warm as we started up the first big switchback. The trail was easy to find and it was much nicer to walk on soil and under trees and have a view out toward Chimney and Companion Rocks. At the top we walked the self-guiding trail to a reconstructed Ancestral Puebloan (Chacoan culture) pithouse and Great Kiva. After lunch we took the rough trail to the Great House (much like a smaller version of the structure at Aztec Ruins Nat Mon we visited in Farmington, NM last spring) high on the hilltop separated from Chimney and Companion only by a narrow, but steep, gap. Until we were on our way down, we had seen no one but the mtn biker and a Forest Service employee. Then, in the space of a few minutes we passed seven hikers on the road and eight more as we neared the bottom. We were a few minutes late for a meeting with Matt, our Club Wyndham Plus salesman and he wasn’t there (He called later to set up a 0930 meet Thursday. We were just as glad to go back to the condo and get showers before dinner.

29 Mar, Thu – We decided on a lazy day with a later start after scrambled eggs and ham.  At 0930 we met again with Matt Kubiak to try to understand how Wyndham could be offering us such a good deal on Club Wyndham Plus. The numbers he presented looked like we could do a down payment using our points from Highland Resorts in Arizona and then pay off the rest by giving our 210,000 Wyndham points back to Wyndham for two years. Meanwhile we could continue to pay WorldMark and use our WM points for condo stays. Club Wyndham Plus would pay our RCI dues and there would be a very small ($14/month) assessment and no maintenance fees. We couldn’t find a catch and returned at 1430 to sign a bunch of forms.  In between times we had lunch and played a round of miniature golf.  Later we took a walk around part of one of the lake and then returned to the condo to get packed up for an early departure.  I spent some time going over the contracts and other forms and found that we had agreed to pay two monthly charges from our checking account – one was the loan amount to pay for the 105,000 points, and the other was a monthly charge of $66.75 for the CWP assessment amount.  I left a message with Matt’s cell phone for him to call us to answer some questions (He had said he would call us at 1700, but did not.) At that point, C.J. and I were not sure if we wanted to leave early before we had a chance to straighten this out – we would not have signed up for a $801 annual maintenance fee, about twice what our Highlands Resort fee is/was.

30 Mar, Fri – Matt never called back so we got up at 0630, had breakfast and cleared out of the condo.  Then we went to the Wyndham office and met with Matt’s manager who eventually had us write on a piece of paper that we had decided to rescind our contract (#) member number (##), sign and date.  He took back all of the signed forms copies we had. Not only was there an $801 annual maintenance fee, but we had signed a form that said we would pay a down payment in six months of more than $6000. And we would have to keep paying the maintenance fees on our Highlands Resort ownership. And the paper that explained how we could use points to offset our maintenance fees said that 1000 points were worth $210 toward maintenance fees, when really a decimal point had been omitted and 1000 pts equaled only $2.10! The deal had definitely been misrepresented!  Around 0840 we got started toward home through Durango, [Just past the entrance to Mesa Verde we stopped at Sleeping Ute Mountain rest area – very nice place, for a rest area] Cortez, then a stop at the visitor center in Monticello, gas in Moab ($3.82), up past Price over Soldier Summit (stopped at a new rest area with a almost full-scale model of a locomotive on the way down). We hit I-15 around the beginning of rush hour and did a slow crawl in the Sandy area almost to SLC, then it was slow again north of SLC.  We stopped for gas ($3.56) and a Costco dinner ($10) in S. Ogden around 1800. Then it was only 45 minutes or so up over the pass at Mantua to Logan and our Super8 for the night.

Mar 31, Sat – When we left the motel after the usual sugar and starch continental breakfast, we drove along Logan’s main street. It looked a little like Ellensburg with its old buildings – very well kept-up and most storefronts filled with businesses. We left around 0745 and cruised over dry and sunny Sweetzer summit and stopped at the rest area just before the junction with I-86. Our big stop of the day was at Malad Gorge State Park ($5) where we walked across the 140 ft pedestrian bridge over the Devil’s Washbowl and then followed the edge of the gorge as far as it went, about a half-hour walk. Then we drove pretty steadily to Boise where we had lunch at Costco ($3.14) and filled up with gas ($3.65). Our last stop was at Sierra Trading Post where a sale was in progress but we found nothing that we had to have. It was another 2 ½ hrs to Pendleton where we had reservations at the Knight’s Inn. Going over the Blues we ran into rain and the temperature dropped from the 73 deg at Malad down to 35 and snow. It had stopped raining by the time we drove into Pendleton so we could take a walk around the historic downtown. We decided to eat at Stetson’s, a western-themed restaurant attached to the motel building. The owner greeted us and served as our waiter and occasionally came over to chat with us. The prime rib, salad, and dessert were all very good and the cost (we shared one 12-oz prime rib, dessert and a couple of drinks) was just about covered by the $50 gift card from Wyndham Pagosa. The motel is clean, warm and dry, fine for an overnight – the folks who write the terrible reviews in TripAdvisor.com must have much higher standards than we do, or they are just whingers.

1 April, Sun – Surprisingly it was sunny when we got up at 0730 although it had rained overnight.  Breakfast in the lobby was all sugar so we just took some milk and used the room microwave to make regular oatmeal. We were on our way by 0840 and Pendleton looked much more interesting in the sunshine as we headed north passing the River Walk and the Round-up Arena.  There was a lot of wind as we drove along I-84 and it continued on I-82 as we crossed into WA. The only stop we made was for gas at Costco Union Gap ($3.83) and we were home around 1300. There was an abrupt change in weather beyond Ellensburg and we had rain and snow over Snoqualmie Pass and rain all the rest of the way to North Bend.

We had a good time in Pagosa Springs skiing and hiking and, if it hadn't been for the timeshare scam, it would have been even better. I'll bet Pagosa Springs is really nice in the fall and I'd like to be there when it is snowy sometime.