5AM Ramblings

Ski Bumming

1 February 2009 | Jason

5:00 Buzz, buzz, buzz.

5:10 Buzz, buzz, buzz.

5:30 Jason, we need to get up.
Bleh, it’s not even starting to get light outside.  OH WAIT!  I can sleep on the bus.
And so I get out of bed and get ready to go out for the day with my bag I packed the night before.  Kevin and I walk to the bus in front of McCormick and take our seats.  Mark sits with me, but I soon doze off.

8:30 I wake up in time to realize we’re there.  I look out the window.  That’s a nice hill, now where’s the mountains?  WHAT?!  That’s it?  It’s just like a little clump of dirt that I could walk over.  Either way, we go to the lodge and get our rentals.  Everything’s already set up so we take them and get changed.  So, Kevin, Zac, I think Jacob, and I head up to the lift.  This lift was a fairly longish ride, but it took us all the way to the summit.  I’m still used to needing about 3 lifts to get all the way up to the top.  We go down the gunsmoke trail, a blue, and I fall, quite a number of times.  My skis kept getting caught on each other.  Luckily, after a few more stumbles, I got my technique back and sailed down the rest of the mountain.  Back at base, we went up again.  This time trying a black.  We went up and down quite a number of times and got most of the trails done.  I just refused to do the ones with moguls because I still can’t do them.  I called up Caroline to see when her lesson would be over, and met her and Mark for lunch.  We ate our lunch and met back up with Kevin.  We were up at the summit where all the paths were blues or blacks.  Since both Mark and Caroline were beginners, we stayed with them so they could take their time getting down the mountain.

For our final run, they wanted to go to the sidearm.  Kevin and I wanted something a little more challenging, so we created a little challenge for ourselves.  Caroline and Mark would take the lift up to where the sidearm began, while Kevin and I would go up to the summit and meet them at the end of the lift.  Mind you, their lift only went up halfway up the mountain, but they had to walk to their lift.  Kevin and I got to the summit, and immediately took off down the slope as fast as we could.  To get to the end of their lift even included a section were we would have to walk uphill to get to them.  Finally, when we got there, we still had to wait about a minute for them to come up the lift.  I was so surprised at how quickly we got down.  The four of us went back down to base and returned our gear.  On the bus, I took another nap.

After getting back, the rest of the story can be read on Craig’s blog.  Link.

Go fast, be reckless, just make sure to know how to stop.  Introduce challenges that seem unreasonable, they may pan out and be the most fun part of your excursion.