Last Friday we started Ski Week! Every other day (Friday, Sunday, and Tuesday, Thursday) we’ve all gone to Ski Cooper Mountain to learn how to Telemark Ski. 
Students were split into groups based on their past experience with skiing and the faculty were also put in groups to teach the students. During school days we have half days where we ski in the morning and come back in the afternoon for lessons. The schedules are modified so that we are still able to get in most of our classes on half days. On Sunday we skied the whole day, with a mix of lessons in the mornings and a free ski in the afternoon. This was super fun and people were able to both alpine ski and tele ski. We are slowly learning how to make our tele turns and how difficult Telemark Skiing truly is. Everyone has improved greatly from the first day and we will continue to ski at Ski Cooper every other day until the end of the week. Friday, we will learn our second expedition groups and those groups will ski together that day.
On Saturday we all had the opportunity to go into town after classes. This was a fun time to go thrift shopping, grab a hot drink from City on a Hill, or just walk around the snowy streets of Leadville with friends. That night, we rearranged Who’s Hall into a movie theater. We all grabbed comfortable chairs and snacks to enjoy as we watched the movie Free Solo. In this movie, Alex Honnold completes the first free solo climb of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. We sat on the edges of our seats throughout the entire movie. On Sunday, we traveled to Ski Cooper where we skied in our groups of students and teachers. For many of us, this was our first time telemark skiing. The fresh powder made the skiing even more enjoyable! We also were able to free ski for an hour after lunch. This was a fun time to test our new skills with friends. After a fun day full of skiing, we all took showers and worked on our homework in order to prepare for the busy week ahead of us.
Academics have been in full swing the past week with hands-on projects and engaging discussions. In our Natural Science class, we are studying the formation of 
snowflakes. For lab, adventured into the elbow deep snow and sampled each layer of snow in order to observe the differences in their densities. Our American History classes have been full of discussions, were we have debated the pros and cons of the continental railroads, and their effects on American society in the late 1800s. In Math, we are improving our complex thinking skills, and learning new processes of solving problems. Our English classes are focusing on the close reading of Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko. We have been analyzing the many themes woven into the text, while also learning about the history of Native Americans who fought in World War II (like the protagonist of the book Tayo). Spanish classes have been filled with the singing of “El Amor Que Perdimos,” by Prince Royce. On top of all of this, we are revising our short essays about First Expedition, while learning new vocabulary regarding backcountry life. In P&P this week, we read articles about the sustainability of meat eating, and had a debate regarding the ethics of meat production.