Vacation - Terrific Tuesday

An uneventful morning. Woke up about 7:30, just in time to read and respond to some emails from the office. With all the white stuff around, I should be concerned that I can't seem to get out to the slopes before 11. I have decided it is my body's way of protecting me—if I got out early, I'd be wiped out by 4 (quitting early is never an option…I always want to get the last lift up. Today I was on the 4th chair from the last).

No powder today, except what I could find on the edges of the runs or in the woods (that's another story….later). I was riding with Dave and Mike, so we hit the green runs on the back as warmups. At the top of the first lift, Mike's binding broke—bummer—so he went back down. Dave and I tried to get to a slightly remote lift and found that you don't want to take a wrong turn under the Thunderwolf lift. It was grisly. Or maybe Grizzly. Moguls the size of … of… well, anyway they were ugly. We were so wiped out, we didn't get to the Lone Moose lift.

While futzing around, I had found a beautiful blue run (Bighorn) and hit it a few times while Dave and Mike took off looking for something flatter. It was beautiful, smooth, and a tad steep. Makes you glad to be alive!
After a late lunch, more fooling around until the last run. The girls were going to pick us up at the bottom, so naturally we went to the top for one more pass through the small terrain park. (I had hit a medium-sized jump coming down earlier and got a sharp hello from my knee, so I won't be jumping the rest of the week—maybe not the rest of the trip.) The wackiest part of the last run came when I nearly cleaned Dave off the slope. Well, actually, I did, but not in the worst way. I was up hill and he was cutting across towards the trees. Slowly. So I did the geometry in my head and figured he'd have to turn soon, hopefully before I got there. I was running at about 80% right on the edge of the slope. He hadn't turned. Closer, faster. Still no turn. Now the math got a bit trickier, but I was feeling good about my chances of getting by him before he hit the trees or I hit him. Ten feet. No turn yet. Five. I just might make it—where the hell is he going? The thought occurred to me, subconciously, that I was committed to my path--to turn now or try to stop would have caused a collision for sure. Got to go for it. (In hindsight, I might have yelled to Dave, but my brain was preoccupied doing math and geometry calculations.) I was close to full speed now, and needing every bit of it. I suspect that the back of my board missed the front of his by inches. I was going too fast to look back, but I did pull up to see if he was OK. No Dave in sight. I yelled. A muffled reply emerged from the trees. It seems Dave got a bit flustered when some asshole went roaring by him and ended up with a faceplant in the powder off the trail. He did manage to miss the trees though. I waited downslope with Mike for Dave to dust himself off (he had to unhook to get out) and slide down to us. The first thing he said was, "Did you see that asshole who cut me off? I'm going to find him in the lodge and…." To which Mike and I both responded that I was that asshole. A disaster averted, but I gave both of them more room from then on.

They say justice can sometimes be swift. ♪ Instant karma gonna get you… ♪ Near the end of the last stretch before the bottom, I saw some beautiful powder just off in the trees. These were little bitty trees, no more than 6-8 feet tall, hardly big enough to qualify, but they were spaced nicely and surrounded by deep powder. Very deep, it turns out. I was rocking, having a great run, cutting through other people's tracks and juking the trees, loving the powder. Then I caught an edge on one of those tracks and toppled butt first, off the track, in the snow. If you have ever been dumped unceremoniously in deep snow with fiberglass thingies attached to your feet, you can appreciate the problem. Every time I put my hand down to push up, I sank to my elbow; I finally managed to got one foot unhooked and tried to stand—I sank to above my knee. Hmmm…. quite an interesting situation. I was the last man out on the hill (the ski patrol had been right up our butts, and I was now off trail and invisible), with people waiting for me but not knowing where I was. Fortunately it wasn't dark, and was too populated for bears. So as not to bore anyone with my further thrashing about, the short of it is I managed to get my board all the way off and rode it like a surfboard down the quasi-carved trail (through the trees—that was a hoot) until I got to a place where I could stand up and strap-in my front foot. A piece of cake from there. As frustrating as that episode was, the ride up to that point was worth it, and it was a lot less stressful than the last ride I took yesterday. I'll have to be more careful tomorrow.