Telluride, July 2004
The 10,000 foot pass in or out of Telluride. Laura and I barely made it up the hill on the way in to town. I really thought we'd start rolling backwards at any point. The night before we'd been following Chris through Kansas and drove through a tornado. I was driving, holding on to the steering wheel with all my might as gusts of wind were pushing us all over the road. Laura was taking pictures of the storm out the window and as lightning flashed we saw the funnel in the distance. Before we'd even confiromed with each other what we'd seen, it was upon us. As we started to freak out, that same van that was too heavily loaded to climb the mountain the next day get pulled upwards. Nothing major, not like spining in the air pulled up, just a jump but we both knew it happened. Chris was behind us in a much lighter vehicle. He was on the phone with us at the time, but I dropped it when I needed both hands, and all he heard was panic. We met up at a rest area down the road where we hung out in one of the bathrooms clutching our laptop bags, all of us having instinctively grabbed our computers when we ran in to the brick building. The emergency weather squaker was going full blast, our adrenaline was kicking, and it turned out to be a pretty fun night.