Snow Days

The weather has calmed in Telluride, and the past few days have been filled with warm "spring skiing." Gorgeous views all around all the way to Utah; I will have great fun sorting through my pictures once I'm at home...

One odd thing this year about skiing by the way is how much greater the avalanche worries are compared to years past around the American West because of how quickly most of the snow has fallen in most areas. Usually this is something you usually hear about only in the backcountry and not actual ski resorts, but within the past week one skier was killed at Jackson Hole and another at Squaw Valley (Tahoe), prompting many "good thing we didn't go there this year!" comments from us. (Only second to the "good thing we didn't go to Whistler!" comments on the chairlift thanks to their recent gondola accident.) Telluride hasn't been immune either- our first day here a skier got buried up to his chest in a small avalanche!

Turns out avalanches are really bad for ski resort PR, so as a result this has mainly effected us by how slow some parts of the mountain have been to open its brand new area, Revelation Bowl, because it's above the treeline so the snow has a nasty habit to "slip." After days of hearing charges explode the area finally opened yesterday, which promptly became mogoled (ie bumpy) within hours because everyone wanted their chance at the Bowl. So goes the skier's life, but it beats getting buried!

Alright, that's all I have for now. Except excitingly enough, I saw a porcupine in the middle of a trail today. He looked like my brother when he hasn't bothered combing his hair.

Little Town in the Box Canyon

Because the family that skis together stays together, my family is spending our Christmas holiday in Telluride, Colorado. We're here because Telluride is our favorite ever since we came here four years ago- it's in remote southwestern CO so there are never any lift lines, the mountain has great varied terrain, and the town is exactly what you'd expect out of one in the West where a large fraction of people are still trying to eck out a living. And seeing as this is our 20th year of skiing as a family (we first visited Vail when I was 3, during my dad's spring break in his professor days) trust me, when we say we have a favorite there's experience to back it up!

Today I took an off day to work on graduate school applications due to the cold (1 degree Farenheit when I woke up, aka -17C!), but the weather's looking promising from here on out- particularly fine as our first few days here consisted of snowstorms, as Telluride has gotten ~50" of snow in the past two weeks.

Promise to be back here to post pictures later as the one above is cheating- it's actually from four years ago, but I figure the scenery doesn't change right? (Apologies for the sizing, as the public library here in town doesn't seem to agree with blogging.)

Light Skiing: Brandywine and Seven Springs

I've said before that I don't really like the Ohio winter because it's cold and dreary and you can't bike everywhere. To be fair though, all this would be forgiven in my mind if there was one decent-sized hill anywhere in the area because then you could at least go skiing or sledding or commit other friction-defying acts of winter mayhem, but there really aren't so we have to make do with what we have. So it goes.

Anyway, last week we had off for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day so to celebrate our free day a few of us decided to go skiing. My friend, Alison, lives about 40 minutes outside Cleveland near the tiny ski area called Brandywine, and has connections that let us get free ski tickets. Hooray! As you can't beat free, a few of us headed out to Brandywine to spend an afternoon of skiing. It was a fair bit below freezing (in case you haven't detected a general trend in this observation) but the sun was out and blazing, and that can make all the difference.

So how tiny is Brandywine anyway? Well here's the view from the top-
Ok to be fair, that doesn't really tell you much, so here's the view from the bottom-
Realize at this point that the first picture includes the top part of the second picture, and there you have the entire vertical (which I think is about 250 feet, compared to nearly ten times that at a place like Wildcat, NH). What you're looking at here is the "black diamond" run of the resort that probably has the same inclination as a more difficult intermediate trail nearly anywhere else, and would be decent if it wasn't over in 15 seconds. I kept running an experiment to see if I could go down the whole thing without turning once, and would've succeeded except I was on rental skis and wasn't sure if I could trust them to abruptly stop as quickly as my own skis do.

Anyway, in our group three of the five were beginning skiers so luckily that only left two of us to commiserate about the lack of difficulty. We ended up doing the terrain park of sorts several times, except paradoxically you didn't have enough hill to do more than perhaps one jump of the five or six so you just coasted over the man-made ridges to make things interesting after your one jump. Somehow, this left something to be desired, but we still had fun hanging out and since it's not like I had to pay for the privilege of my lift ticket I suppose I should stop complaining. After all, it's not Ohio's fault that it's not, say, Colorado.

The interesting thing about skiing last week, by the way, is I actually went twice in one week! Yay! This doesn't happen too often due to a combination of work and geography, but I went home to Pittsburgh this past weekend and convinced my mom and dad it would be a great idea if we spent Sunday at Seven Springs (about an hour to the east of Pittsburgh). Seven Springs isn't exactly a giant mountain either if we're looking at vertical, but at 750 feet it's got Brandywine beat by a decent shot so it was fun. It was actually around the freezing point, and snowing-
It was fun to ski at Seven Springs because I used to go there several times every season right until I left for uni (I started skiing when I was 5 years old), so this was my first time skiing there in four years. The only annoying part about the whole thing was there were quite a few snowboarders who didn't know what they were doing- I don't mind snowboarders who are actually in control and are not idiots (no, really! I swear!) but there's something about boarders who go on trails too difficult for their skill level and scrape off all the good snow that really annoys me. (Such as the lack of good snow that there wasn't much of to begin with.) Now it really is kind of comical to be heading down a difficult run only to have snowboarders falling to the right and left of you, but this starts to become a lot less funny when one of them runs into you.

Yes, you read that last bit right. I was heading down my very last run when there was a Snowboarder Dude who was out of control and barreling down the slope, and boarded right across the top of my skis. Luckily I'm good enough at this to regain my balance and not fall when someone does something so asinine as run into me because he literally can't control his own actions, but Snowboarder Dude paid for this by falling head over heels a fair fraction of the slope before stopping. After noting to myself that he was all right I went past him without stopping, because to be fair I don't want to socialize with anyone who just hit me. I noticed later that he scratched up the top of my skis pretty well, too, so it's probably best I wasn't near him when I discovered that detail.

But anyway, to finish off I will note that I brought my skis and ski stuff back to Cleveland so anyone who wants to make a foray to one of the little places around here should let me know! And as my joke of the day, here's something my high school physics teacher used to tell me whenever I mentioned skiing while he was around-

Q: Why are skiers like crack addicts?
A: Because it's all they think about, all they talk about, all they do on weekends, they're obsessed with white powder, and it's going to kill them eventually.

Ski Gunstock! (and Killington)

As some people know, I have a minor obsession about skiing that runs in the family. It's just so much fun to slide down a mountain in the fresh air! This year my family spent a few days skiing in New Hampshire and Vermont before driving back home from my cousin's wedding, so here's the second batch of pictures from that occasion.

The second place we skied was Gunstock, a nice little mountain that has got to have the best view of any ski resort anywhere. This is because it's right on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee, the very large lake my family loves to visit, and here's a picture of it from our place-
(By the way, in this picture the water is actually frozen ice that happened to freeze like that, and that little dot is one of the first ice fishermen of the season!)

As a result of that, the awesome thing about skiing on Gunstock is all you do the entire way down is drink in the view-
My pictures don't quite capture it (it was still pretty cold, and my camera doesn't like functioning well in subzero temperatures) but trust me, it was gorgeous. Interestingly, this picture looks back to the spot where I took the first picture from toward the left and back from that large-ish island (Bear Island), as one of those littlish islands is the one I am forever taking pictures of in front of our house.
Here's my brother, Patrick, standing at the top of Gunstock. Before I forget to mention, the other interesting thing about this resort is all the runs have ammunition-related names, such as Trigger, Pistol, and Six Shooter. (And at Wildcat, detailed in an earlier post, everything is named after kitties.) I suppose the Second Amendment is alive and well at this place.

Anyway, for our very last day we decided to leave early and drive to Killington, Vermont and spending the night somewhere after the day of skiing there. Killington is the biggest ski resort on the East Coast and I'd only skied there once before, so I was really excited to see what it would be like, but unfortunately I was a bit disappointed. See, we'd been spoiled on days prior by incredible snow in New Hampshire, as there had been a large snowstorm just a few days beforehand, but Killington apparently didn't get a lot of that snow and was very icy as a result. Combine that with the blustery weather, people saying it wasn't icy at all for Killington (you mean you normally need ice skates?), and very expensive ski tickets (I think it was $70 per person, whereas the little NH resorts were maybe $25 max) mean I'm probably not going to go out of my way to go there again when there are so many other great places in the area. (To be fair, it's not like I paid for my own lift ticket as I was there with my family, but this is something to keep in mind should I end up as a poor graduate student in New England.)

One thing I really liked about Killington though was the fact that the wind had turned all the trees into "powdered sugar" as my family calls it- you know, when the pine trees are so coated in snow that it looks like they're made of candy. Absolutely gorgeous! So here's me acting a bit macho on the edge of a precipice with a grove of powdered sugar pine trees in the background.

Baby, It's Cold Outside

Happy New Year! As of right now it is COLD in NH: the mercury is set at 8F last I checked (about 3pm), meaning today we took a break from skiing as no one was really gung-ho about skiing when it'd be 10 degrees colder than that. Yesterday was fun though: it was a balmy 15F at the base of Wildcat Mountain where we went, so here is my brother, sister, and me with Mount Washington in the background. My sister's the one in white, I'm the one in light blue, and my brother's the one in red. Gorgeous day and lots of great snow, even if it was on the nippy side, hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Best part of skiing yesterday: skiing with the several inches of fresh powder on the ground, which is great because this part of the country usually just has icy crud. Worst part: my brother was cutting across a trail to another one, going past a tiny chute called "The Elevator Shaft" correctly but deciding to cut down later on what must be known as "The Elevator Shaft That Never Passed Building Code Regulations." Must've been an old hiking trail it was that narrow... anyway, as it turns out, you can successfully go down a narrow black-diamond-steep chute if you strategically ram yourself into snowbanks that grew up around trees in an "I've skied 15 years so I know what I'm doing" manner. The things I check out so you don't have to...
Anyway, I'll leave you with this picture of the island in front of my family's NH place as it looked earlier today: most of the lake is frozen (though I wouldn't walk out too far yet) but it doesn't really freeze much here due to an underground spring. Give the ice another few weeks, though, and it will be covered in little fishing huts, some of which take the word 'little' to amazingly large places, and ice sailboats that go as fast as a car on the highway. New Hampshire is a fun place in the wintertime, even if it's a bit nippy out.