OGDEN -- If they had their druthers, most young couples would prefer to spend the cold winter months curled up together by a warm fireplace.
But Darren and Tammy Lehto of Salt Lake City do most of their wintertime curling on a sheet of ice.Not that they don't appreciate those pleasant fireside opportunities.
But the Lehtos have spent the past year crisscrossing America intensely pursuing a dream: becoming good enough at competitive curling to play in the national championships some time within the next few years.
Sometimes they curl together on a mixed team. Other times, Tammy is the skip (short for skipper) of a women's team representing the Ogden Curling Club, while Darren plays with an up-and-coming men's squad from California.
"We've been traveling a lot this past year," said Tammy, who is seated in the Weber County Ice Rink watching several of the nation's top-ranked teams compete in the 2000 U.S. National Curling Championships in Ogden.
The competition will wind up an eight-day run Saturday with a gold-medal round to determine the men's and women's title holders for this year and secure those teams a shot at the trials for the 2002 Winter Olympics, also scheduled for the Weber ice sheet.
Tammy's Ogden rink (Curlingese for team) faced some of those same lady curlers recently at the U.S. Curling Association regionals in Nebraska. Now, she is busy photographing and rooting for her former opponents.
"You don't get to this level practicing once a week," she said, pointing out a well-placed draw here or an effective take-out there.
It takes a lot of hard work, experience and conditioning to match the skill of nationally ranked curling teams, Tammy explained, and it's difficult for curlers to climb that pinnacle without a facility specifically dedicated to the sport.
The Weber ice sheet is primarily used for figure skating, hockey and recreational skating. Only a few hours are set aside each week for curling.
In addition, hockey or skating ice is not as hard or level as curling ice, she said. It lacks the kind of "pebbling" on the ice sheet surface -- beads of ice made by spraying droplets of water on the ice -- that allows curling stones to travel with less friction.
The old hockey-skating surface was removed a week prior to the national championships so the new layer of world-class curling ice could be laid down.
"We would need our own facility just to have ice like this," she said. "And for us (in the Ogden Curling Club) to play at a competitive level, we really need this kind of ice all the time."
Top-level curling also requires more ice time than is available at the Weber sheet, and local curlers need to find stiffer competition to help build their skills, noted Tammy.
Which is one reason she and Darren have invested a lot of their time and resources the past year traveling to quality curling rinks in Wisconsin, North Dakota and Washington state to participate in "bonspiels," the curler's word for tournaments.
"This year, we're going to Cape Cod for a summerspiel," said Tammy. She also serves as vice president of the year-old Ogden Curling Club that now has grown to some 70 members, making it one of the fastest-growing curing organizations in America.
She and her husband are Canadian citizens who grew up in the province of Alberta. Darren started curling in his early teens, and Tammy picked up the sport in her mid-20s.
They met nearly a decade ago while attending college, where Darren earned a degree in civil engineering and she earned a diploma in landscape architecture.
The Lehtos married and then moved to Utah about four years ago when Darren landed a job with Trus Joist, an engineered wood products company. Tammy is unable to work in her field at this point because of the nature of her visa.
But their shared interest in curling has grown along parallel lines, and they decided a year ago to take the steps that would elevate them to the competitive curling level.
"There's so much to this game," said Tammy. "It's very graceful, the strategy is interesting, there is so much technique and finesse involved, and it's truly a team sport. On a good team, everybody is in such synch. It's a rhythm. Everybody on the team has to take part in making it work.
"I started curling socially because I enjoyed the close friendships" curlers usually develop, she added. "But you can be as serious as you want about this sport."
And the Lehtos are dead serious.
"We have a lot of learning to do before we can play at this level," she said. "But we both have goals to get there within a few years.
"We focus so much on curling that sometimes it makes it hard to find time to do things at home or spend time with each other," Tammy said, "because one of us is usually gone.
"It takes some sacrifices and we have to prioritize things" to ensure they set aside time for each other, she added. "Financially, we put a lot into it . . . and we plan all our vacations and trips around curling."
Other members of her Ogden rink have children, Tammy said, and they have to work their competition schedules around their family lives.
And unless they're independently wealthy, curlers can't afford to give up their day jobs.
Nobody gets paid to curl, she said, although her Ogden rink is following the example of nationally ranked teams and looking for a sponsor that can help defray travel and contest expenses.
The Lehtos agree it's worth the effort to achieve the extraordinary balance necessary to have a family life and still excel at curling.
"We try to keep things in perspective " and continually work on maintaining a healthy relationship, she said. "But we also look at this as an opportunity that may never come around again."