CATHERINE LUTZ

It took her more than 30 years to find a guy who is as passionate about skiing as she is – some would say even more so. But, anything is possible, right?

Catherine Claire Lutz was born to Claude and Jarka Krcalova Lutz in Strasbourg, France on Dec. 21, 1972. Claude and Jarka were World Champion whitewater kayakers (in fact, a certain pregnancy thwarted their opportunity to compete in the 1972 Olympics). What it meant for their family, in the end, was that the kids were expected to succeed at something. Signs were promising when Mom and Dad would bring her skiing in a backpack – she seemed quite content to be there, they said, silent and smiling. Shortly after she learned to walk, she was put on skis of her own on the tame slopes of ski areas in Les Vosges (an ancient gentle mountain range near Strasbourg).

The family, including 1-year-old sister Dominique, moved to the Chicago suburbs in 1977, and soon thereafter weathered the winter of 1977-78, the most severe in Illinois history with 18 serious winter storms and snowfall more than twice the usual. Catherine remembers building many cool snowforts with her friends in the frontyard during those Chicago winters, and graduating to the one slow double chairlift — from the four ice-coated towropes — at Holiday Park Ski Area where her parents taught skiing on weekends.

Junior high was a milestone. Well, not really – she attended Transfiguration Catholic School in Wauconda which was a K-8 school. Still, there was the usual: braces, hairspray, shortening the uniform skirts and figuring out that getting all 50 states right on the geography test wasn’t really that cool. During this time her parents continued to drag her along on summer camping and kayaking trips, which she complained about but secretly thoroughly enjoyed – especially the wild running around in the woods and making up elaborate Barbie stories with her best friend Celeste, sister Dom and the amazing guy friend who got dragged into it, Mike Cline.

Catherine worked at being cool at Carmel Catholic High School too, failing miserably but making some awesome friends whose teenage rebelliousness turned into the kind of unique, independent spirit she still admires in them today. Cathy, Carrie and Jen made the most of their teenage years (especially after getting their drivers’ licenses) by adventuring in Utah and Europe together, working at Beggars’ Pizza with way too many after-work parties, sneaking out regularly to party in parking lots (usually via the pizza shop delivery car), night skiing at Wilmot, and spending a lot of time in detention (remember “You’re jugged!”).

McGill University was a whole new world for this Midwestern teenager, and soon after arriving in fall 1990 she shed her feathered, hairsprayed ’do and started drinking Molson. Catherine studied Russian and German language and literature … on the sixth floor -- boy, did she think she was cool then. And thanks to the usual liberal university influences, plus her supercool Polish-Canadian friend Marta, a couple summers in Europe and some time on the McGill ski team, she knew she couldn’t go back to a normal, suburban existence with a 9-5 job and weekend garage-cleaning sessions.

After six months traveling in South America and a stint at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Catherine finally heeded the call to go West, staying with Olympics buddy Kristen in Boulder before renting a big, sweet house on Grove Street. It was from there that she went on many a ski boondoggle all over Colorado arranged through her roommate and dear friend Mike Miracle.

Careerwise, though, she was still floating. It came to her suddenly one day: she loved to write and Miracle, a senior editor at Skiing magazine, seemed to have a pretty good life. Starting out by writing and editing the local Sierra Club chapter newsletter – figuring that she could help change the world through writing, somehow – Catherine graduated to some freelance work and an internship with High Country News in Paonia.

Now fully sucked into the western Colorado lifestyle, in 2000 she accepted a job in Basalt, Colorado with the Roaring Fork Sunday, an independent, grassroots weekly newspaper covering the Roaring Fork Valley. Here she learned the art of reporting and photography as a fundamental service to one’s local community, and will forever be influenced in every step of her career by her mentor and friend, Donna Dowling Robinson.

The Sunday, sadly, went the way of many small independents, sucked up and extinguished by corporate forces, and Catherine went on to use her pen and occasionally a lens (OK, the process was completely digitized by now) for the weekly Snowmass Sun, The Aspen Times and currently the Aspen Daily News. It means a lot to feel like a fundamental cog of the community wheel.

Oh yeah, you’re all waiting for the important part. During the last eight Roaring Fork Valley winters Catherine gradually learned the valued blessing of starting the work day off with a few good runs, and four years ago – in the blazing heat of summer – met a guy with the same values during a mountain bike outing arranged by their mutual friend Michelle Fox. “Look cute,” Michelle said that day in July 2004. “There’s a cute guy coming.”

How one can look cute in black spandex shorts while sweating rivulets and jolting over rocks or teetering awkwardly on a saddle I still don’t know. But I tried to dismiss the setup, until he called me the following week. Our first date was Carbondale Mountain Fair – he dances funny but is really sweet, I thought.

It was a long, slow courtship and like peeling back multiple layers of gift wrap, and what I found in the end was more special and worth the effort than I could ever have imagined. I still don’t know that I’ve yet reached the ultimate prize, that I’ve seen every angle or understand every nuance. But I’m eager and willing, moreso than I’ve been with anything else, to continue on this road of wondrous discovery.

Together, life is good.

MIKE SLADDIN

Mike’s acceptance into the Lutz family was more immediate than Catherine realized – he was the only man whom her dog Slinky allowed to pet right off the bat. He clearly has a good soul.

Michael David Sladdin was born March 2, 1967 – during a blizzard/powder day – in Southbridge, Massachusetts, to George Sladdin and Danielle Aspar. His early stand-out childhood memories were mostly painful, he said: falling off the top bunk onto a vacuum cleaner, slicing his left leg wide open on a windshield wiper while sliding down his mother’s car’s windshield, getting bit on the whole face by the neighbor’s dog seemingly out of the blue, while eating a hamburger.

Before starting kindergarten the family moved to Sturbridge. Their house on Fisk Hill had a big yard and backed up to some woods, and along with the neighborhood kids Mike spent a lot of time in the woods, sledding down the hill and ice-skating on a nearby pond. As his mother tells it, Mike lived outside, and would scream and yell and pout to be allowed to play outside even at night. It was also here where Mike first strapped on a pair of skis, going up and down that little hill with his leather boots and primitive cable bindings.

In fourth grade there was another move, to Attleboro into a split-level ranch house. For the next several years hockey was his major passion. Vacations were spent fishing and camping on Cape Cod and hanging out on the Connecticut shore. Mike was 13 when the family took a ski trip to Song Mountain in upstate New York, and mastered his favorite run, Chopsticks (every run was a song name). Danielle says on the second day of the trip, she saw two streaks go by – it was Mike and his sister Tania, who went from being beginners to solid intermediates in one day.

This New England upbringing was interrupted by a year in Europe when Mike was in 10th grade. Danielle, who was French, thought it’d be good for the kids to spend some time in the old country, so he spent the first quarter of that school year in Switzerland and the rest of the school year in Paris, living with his Vietnamese grandmother and learning more about his heritage. Something many people probably don’t know about Mike is he has a good French accent and believes strongly in Eastern superstitions, like the bad luck of the number 4.

Mike’s last two years of high school were full of lots of rock concerts, ski club at Wachusett Mountain in the winter and lifeguarding in the summer. The snow and sea theme continued in college – while he attended landlocked University of Massachusetts at Amherst and majored first in engineering, then marketing, Mike says his minor was scuba diving. Learning on Boston’s north shore, he went on to do scuba trips to Florida and Cozumel – and spent most winter breaks and weekends skiing at Sugarbush. Vermont.

It was on a scuba trip his last year of college that he met Brian Stevens, who told Mike of his plans to head to Aspen on his motorcycle. So it happened that in the fall of 1989, after graduating from college, Mike packed up his newly purchased motorcycle, plus a ski bag ready to ship just in case he decided to stay in Aspen too. The pair headed first south, then west with more or less the same path and young men’s abandon as Jack Kerouac’s characters in “On the Road.”

After getting stuck in a snowstorm atop Vail Pass on November 5 and spending the night in the visitor center, Mike and Brian rolled into Aspen on November 6. With credit card bills mounting, Mike decided he needed a job and might as well stay for the winter. They shared a 12-foot by 12-foot room and Mike worked as a busboy and barback, both jobs at the base of the mountain. With a ski pass provided with his job, on his days off, he skied – “We were poor so we skied; it was cheaper than doing anything else,” he says.

Soon he had the Aspen lifestyle dialed in: construction in the summer (it paid well and he was learning skills to build his own home someday), and work in a ski shop in the winter. Going back East was not an option. Mike decided very consciously that he was revolving his life around skiing, and would never work, well, maybe for fun – only play – in the snow (no construction in the winter).

From one of his roommates, he heard about an opportunity to get involved in a co-housing project, affordable units that were going up with common amenities and a lot of input by the people who were going to live there. So he was able to own some prime real estate in Aspen – with a full view of Aspen Mountain, for example – early on, and that was key.

In the meantime, he worked on his skiing – competing in the town race league and upping his time on the hill. His friends know him as one of the most laid-back guys in town, whose intensity and precision with the things he chooses to focus on is unparalleled. With his carpentry work, for example, he’s a perfectionist, and he’s poured a large amount of his energies in the last few years on his nonprofit, Powder to the People.

And now, at the ripe young age of 41, Mike has decided on the proverbial settling down … but not really. On any given winter day, he and Catherine can be found chasing each other around the ski hill. They try to work on their surf technique during off-season trips, learn to ride their new, expensive mountain bikes in the riding months, and have plans to make use of Mike’s skills soon by building a summer cabin in the woods somewhere in Colorado.

Together, life is good.

SLINKY

Slinky came into our lives in such a way that made it clear we were meant to be together.

Sweetie was the name of an abandoned cattle dog mix that was featured in an ad for adoptable dogs from a local shelter. She caught Catherine’s eye one day and stayed unadopted for several weeks. Catherine couldn’t understand why, as this dog seemed perfect in every way. It was a sign, so Catherine, who was not ready for the responsibility of a pet, decided to visit the dog to understand why it wasn’t being taken into a loving home. Intending just to take Sweetie for a walk, Catherine met with the dog and rescuer, and in short order took her home in January 2001, when she was about two years old.

This dog was shy and dirty but the two bonded right away. She got into Catherine’s car and refused to leave her side. A naming contest was held – “Sweetie” was just not the right name – and by serendipity and her character she became “Slinky.”

Slinky met Mike more than three years after Catherine had her, and he’s the only man whom she accepted almost right away. He’s also the only person whom Slinky will follow, or stay home with, besides Catherine.

Slinky has been a loyal companion and best friend. She has bonded with co-workers, friends and neighbors and is probably more well known around town than we are. (Excited exclamations of “Slinky!” precede us when she bounds ahead, tail wagging, begging for treats.) Slinky loves to ski in the backcountry with us and has learned how to ride a snowmobile; she barks excitedly and tugs at the leash when it’s time to go for a bike ride; and she’s always ready to go for a car ride. She’s a fixture in Catherine’s office and on the job site with Mike. She snuggles with us in bed before being banished to one of her many beds every night and every morning. Even in her old age, Slinky has learned a few new tricks from Mike, including the “squirrel” pose, and going to her bed and dropping her nose to the ground for a treat. The best part is seeing her excitement, the whipping of her tail back and forth, when one of us comes home for the evening.

The three of us are one happy family now.