Vacation - Monday, Monday

Was snowing again this morning....Pete, Tracy and I went out in the morning and fooled around on the backside of Andesite all morning. Never having to go down to the village, we ended up without lift tickets--an obvious flaw in the Big Sky system. Never fear, Brant and I cashed in the vouchers for the afternoon...balance was restored to the universe.

Our afternoon started with a trip over to the Shedhorn lift; this was not an inconsiderable effort. A long runout to get to it made me think of Lone Moose, and I verbalized that there better be some great runs to make this worthwhile. The trails looked great from the lift, but, oddly enough, they were icy under the powder, and we struggled down until we had a choice of a black diamond run or a long runout to the base. Of course, we took the black run. It was marvelous, not too steep with lots of little treelets dotting the landscape for us to navigate around. Then it ended with a trail closed sign.

My earlier experience with closed runs led us to veer off onto another trail that looked fine from the top, but soon became mogul Hell. I looked back later and found it was named Jock Strap. How fitting. We finally made it down, and insane fools that we are, went back up to find the blue slope we had been searching for previously. The fact that visibility was almost zero and the upper part of the slope was littered with rocks didn't seem to faze us. And, in fairness, it was a wonderful run we eventually found, covered with deep powder and only a few buried rocks. But that was it for us with Shedhorn. (Looking at the bottom of my board, it should have been called Shred-horn.)

The long run back to the main village lifts was the fastest I have ever been on, so much so as to be dangerous. Like a beautiful woman--fast, narrow and curvy. I did have to ride up the inside slope to avoid someone, and found a nasty pile of rocks. BIG ding in my board. Oh, well, it's old.

Brant and I eventually found our way over to the terrain park and discovered that there was lots of good powder left on the sides. (The middle had large jumps and rails, plus a huge half-pipe: we stayed on the sides.) It was great until Brant and I got separated; I ended up in the park again and he got stuck on a black diamond in the forest with moguls. Ouch!

A missed trail on the way home added another 50 yards of hiking by the time we found our way back to the real slope and headed home. My fault, I suppose, and not well received by the fool who followed me down it. Oops.

All in all, a great day.