snow trip #2 of 2003

spring break 2003. monday march 24 to thursday march 27.

• monday: left at 6am. slept all the way to tahoe, crammed into the back of melinda’s truck. no, the truck’s cabin, not the bed. although that might have been fun. rented a snowboard–first the guy gave me mismatching boots (i put my right foot in and said “gee this is tight” and jenny said “hey that’s a six and a half” and when i got another pair of eights one of the holes for lacing up your boots was missing and bla bla bla, so the guy said he’d give me a better board, and though it looked all scratched up and old it was better because it was more flexible than the other ones, “and you want more flexible” so i was like, sure, whatever. it was green. it said “elan” and “fifty 50” on it. i boarded with jenny, and patrick, ayelet, and yaniv skiied. we did mostly greens that first day on the middle part of the mountain. afterwards we went to the cabin, looked around, proclaimed its awesomeness (two rooms and a living room and a kitchen on the first floor, four double beds on the second. 1 and a half bathrooms. etc), and went to ceasar’s to eat buffet.
• tuesday: forgot (and bought/rented) goggles/boots. patheticness. we all went together to the little terrain park on the right side of the mountain and had a whole lot of fun. i caught a whole lot of air going fearlessly off of this one jump and crashed magnificently to the ground, but not before i went over a tiny bump on a previous round and fell on my face. i got a tiny cut where the snow hit my goggles which hit my glasses which hit my foreheard. yeah, the terrain park was fun. that night we got cheese pizza and an expensive pizza place–all the pizza places in town had ridiculous deals where a cheese pizza was half the price of a one-topping pizza–so we went to safeway and got a can of pineapple. it was great. we played super smash brothers on steve’s gamecube and roasted marshmallows on the log that jenny brought. oh yes! how could i forget the humar article?! so while diana and i were waiting in the back of melinda’s truck for the pizza, she started telling me about this crazy article she was reading in one of the “outside” magazines that was lying around the cabin about this crazy mountain climber who kept doing things that everyone said would kill him, like make solo climbs on a mountain that had killed everyone who tried to climb it before in groups, and stuff like that. and he had a little son and a wife, and he was making this one climb and he says he has chakra and he always measures his chakra before he goes on climbs and that he can feel the life energy of the rocks, and yeah so he was almost going to die, and when you’re almost going to die it’s very important to keep your heat to your heart and your brain becuase that’s all you need to live, dont waste heat on your limbs… so he kept going on this suicide mission and after like a month he looked at his son’s little shoe and thought to himself “if i don’t turn back now, i’m going to die” so he turned back. and then he broke like everything in his body doing some construction work on his house–he fell into a ditch and almost bled to death. for some reason diana and i found this entire story hilarious. i think it was in diana’s delivery. in any case i found it here: http://outsideonline.com/outside/sports/200206/200206_humar_1.adp
• wednesday: it rained at the cabin all night. on wed morning it was snowing pretty hard. we spent some time in the morning trying to get reception on our cell phones so we could call kirkwook for the weather conditions, and then we spent some more time trying to use my calling card with the phone at the cabin since long-distance calls are not allowed, and then we finally realized that it wasn’t working because 888 means it’s a toll-free number, so we just called it with the phone at the cabin and it was fine. “snow levels are dropping” which we first interpreted as “there is less snow now!” but someone piped up that it probably meant that the altitude that snow was happening (and not rain) was getting lower which actually means more snow, and since kirkwood is pretty high up this was a good thing. when we got to the mountain everyone was miserable and wnated to go home but we said “well we’ll just try a few hours anyway, we can always go home, we have season passes, it’s all right” and so we went and then it was a great day. diana, melinda and steve took me out on the little gully for a few runs, which was fun. i could feel myself getting better. we also went on the BIG terrain park with the halfpipe at the end–of course we didn’t go on the halfpipe–but yeah, it was great. i think i made myself some pasta from some that diana had bought that night for dinner. we played more smash brothers and got another log.
• thursday: i went with diana and melinda and steve to the back of the mountain. we took off our gear and hiked, yes, hiked to the very top of the mountain and went down from there. i thought i was going to die. there was a trail of deep footprints in the deep snow that you put your boots into, and since i was carrying my board, the wind kept catching me off-guard. i thought i was going to fall the wrong way and tumble to my death. it was a lot of fun. we also went on this jump at the end of a small valley between two boulder-big rock things and took videos of it with steve’s digital camera. i failed and went into a tree. but diana’s was classic–you can see her clearly as she gets a whole lot of air, then completely wipes out and hits her knee on her head in a huge flurry of snow. it was great. and then we drove home. (where did your names come from? complexity theory? macs?) ah it was fun.

yup. so there was my spring break. it took me long enough to get this posted.