I met Chris in the fall quarter of my junior year at Colorado State University. I used to hang out with a few of my fellow physics undergrads every week where we would rotate cooking dinner and hosting the group. On one of the weeks I hosted, my friend Brenda asked “hey I know a cool guy that we should invite to be part of the dinner club, his name is Chris.” I replied “hey, if he’s cool, invite him over.” I instantly liked Chris, his sense of humor, taste in music and spirit of adventure made it easy to want to hang out with him. A couple of months later, CSU (alumni society? boosters? I can’t remember who was the organizer) had 'travel-lodging-tickets to the game' packages for students to watch the Rams play in the Liberty Bowl in Memphis, TN. The catch was that you had to sign up with a group of four. None of my other friends were into sports, so I thought this was an opportunity I was going to miss out on, that is until Chris offered for me to join two of his high school buddies . That trip was a blast and by the end of the trip, I felt like I had known those guys for years. After that trip, Chris and I would go to Rams athletic events from football games to watching Becky Hammon play basketball. Other than watching the Rams, I will also look back and smile thinking about the times I slid on snow down mountains with Chris. Our first outing was doing a backcountry run near Cameron Pass. That was the first time I had ever snowboarded on untracked powder and watched a dog (Jed) keep up with a skier and snowboarder. Another outing that stands out in my mind is a trip I took to Seattle to visit a grad school buddy, John, that was doing a post-doc at UW. John and I drove up to Mt. Baker to snowboard/ski with Chris who drove down from Vancouver in his awesome Mitsubishi microbus. The snowboarding and skiing was great but the best part of the outing was standing in the parking lot drinking Pabst Blue Ribon out of the can. Chris had John and I laughing so hard it was a challenge to finish our Blue Ribons.
I wanted to share a picture, so I had to dig through my collection to find the right one. This is one of my favorite pictures of Chris with my other physics friends. This picture was taken at a BBQ at my place during the weekend of our graduation from CSU. Chris is instantly recognizable in his Broncos shirt, I'm standing next to him with the corny hat and CSU t-shirt, Ryan (one of the original dinner club members) is next, next in line Warren and Kathy is on the opposite end.
It brings tears to my eyes to think I will no longer get the chance to ride a chairlift or drink a beer with my friend at a Rams game, but I do smile when I think of how lucky I was to meet Chris and think about the fun times we had together.
Thanks for sharing this, Jason.