Alex Beltran

Last week, I went through a bunch of stuff in our storage room and I found some old photos of my friend Alex Beltran:

We took a ski trip together over Reading Week in 1992 to Lake Tahoe. We were all serious about that trip - spending lots of time training for it. I remember Alex was doing a lot of lunges to get ready for it (not that he needed to - he was one of the finest athletes that I've ever known).

Our first day there was one to remember. We were poor college students, so we were determined to maximize the amount of skiing that we could do on that trip. We flew into Reno on a charter flight, and got into our rental car sometime after midnight. It was still a good 2+ hour drive to South Lake Tahoe where we were staying, and I don't think we got to bed until about 3:30am, since Alex was all being all goofy that night.

Since we wanted to maximize our skiing, we were up at 7am to drive to our first destination: Heavenly. We stopped at McDonalds on the way to the mountain (believe me, this is important). Now Heavenly is a pretty big mountain, with the summit just over 10,000 feet. On our first run of the day we went right up to the summit. We skied down to the first fork in the trail and we both saw the world steadily blacking out - fortunately it reversed itself!

We spent the rest of the day going up and down all faces of the mountain. We decided to skip lunch because lunch was for wimps, and skiied straight through until closing time. We drove back to South Lake Tahoe and set out looking for a place to eat. Now, South Lake Tahoe is on the Nevada side of the border so there was no shortage of casinos with all you can eat buffets - perfect for starving college students. We got to the "chuck wagon buffet" (or something like that) at 7pm and wound up standing in line for an hour before we got in. That hour was probably the longest hour of our lives since the last food we had eaten was at McDonalds that morning.

We ate a ridiculous amount of food. We ate so much food that our tummies hurt, which for some reason made us giggle all the way back to the hotel room while holding our guts. When we got back to the hotel room, Alex was goofier than ever and started bouncing up and down on his bed. He then turned to me and asked "how's your peripheral vision?" We did a quick test (hold a finger in front of one eye and stare at it, close your other eye and move your other hand until you can just see it). We found out that in one eye Alex could see only about 90 degrees or so, compared to nearly 180 degrees for his other eye. I told him 'dude, you'd better get that checked out'; he looked worried for maybe a minute and then started bouncing up and down on his bed while pretending to be a big dog.

That was a trip that I won't ever forget. I had wonderful company, and the weather was about as close to perfect as you could wish for.

Today I decided to Google for Alex since we lost touch some years ago. I was stunned to find this. My condolences go out to your entire family. I won't forget you.

Comments

[joshdavey]

Woah. This is not the kind of story I expected to read on your blog this morning.

I am terribly sorry about Alex. Sounds like a stand up guy, may the best be with his family.

[Eric Dewhirst]

John – thanks for the story and the awesome pictures. Just when I thought the tears for Alex were going to subside – another great story about such a great guy. We were all so lucky to have him as a friend. Thanks