Hot Summer Nights

This past weekend I went up to Mammoth Mountain, CA with Suzanne and Val.  It was an amazing trip – we got an insane amount of good snow to play around in.

Basically Mammoth is a bit of a drive…it takes about 7 hours to get there.  Since Suzanne had class until around 6:45 we couldn’t leave until later in the evening.  By the time everyone was at my apartment and we had the car packed it was 8:00pm.  That is a bit late to start.  On the way there we missed the turnoff to 395 and ended up staying on the 15 towards Las Vegas.  Luckily we caught ourselves in time and were able to cut back on the 58, but it still cost us almost 40 minutes!  It was kind of a bummer.  We were joking that we might have kept driving till we saw the lights of Las Vegas.  That would have been interesting.

Towards the end of the drive we hit some snow and the road was completely covered.  Add that to the fact that it was pitch black and the light reflecting off the falling snowflakes reduced visibility to about 30 ft.  We were exhausted, and I drove the last leg since it was my car and I was most familiar with driving it in bad conditions.  We had to put chains on the tires so we stopped in front of a few other cars and used the light from their headlights to help us see.  We finally rolled into the driveway of the Sierra Lodge at 5 in the morning.  Yes.  5:00 am.  It was pretty brutal.

We woke up at around 11am and snowboarded for half a day.  By then it had snowed almost a foot of fresh snow, and the conditions were amazing.  Even though we were really, really tired we were invigorated by the sheer joy of sliding down pillowy runs of fresh powder.

The next day we headed over to Chair 25 where there were lots of intermediate difficulty tree runs.  Snowboarding through the trees when there is fresh snow is such an amazing experience.  The trees force you to pick a path and dodge branches and trunks, which adds an exhilarating challenge.  The fresh powder adds a feeling of weightlessness, and you dodge and swerve the trees, sometimes ducking through a narrow keyhole of branches.

It snowed all day, and by the end there was even more snow.  Val’s friend lent her a tiny handheld video camera device.  We took some first person video of ourselves riding around, and I had a super fun time following Val and Suzanne through the trees with it.  I’ll post video when we get it all edited.

Overall this was probably the best snowboarding trip I’ve been on in terms of quality snow.  Also, we had a pretty awesome time together too – lots of funny one liners and silly moments causing uncontrollable laughter.  Looking forward to doing this again soon!

[check back for pictures in the next day or two!]

This past week has been pretty intense here in Southern California.  For five days straight we’ve been having rain and wind akin to small monsoons.  It was pretty weird…every day a new storm would roll through, with pouring rain and heavy winds.  This kind of weather is very unusual for Southern California, and a 5 day stretch of it is almost unheard of.  Lots of records were broken, including a barometric pressure reading that was originally set in the late 1800′s.

Even though it was pretty depressing after the first few days, we did get some cool thunderstorms – something I thought I wouldn’t see much of since San Diego rarely gets them.  I love thunderstorms and can’t get enough of them!

Another benefit of these storms was the fact that they dumped a LOT of snow in the local mountains!  This means some goooood snowboarding!

Yesterday Val and I went up to Mt. Baldy which is just a bit northeast of LA.  It’s 8600′ at the peak I think.  You have to put chains on your tires if you don’t have 4 wheel drive.  The mountain roads got kind of treacherous as you get higher, and at one point I had to turn around because even with chains I wasn’t getting any traction on the road.  My tires were spinning and I wasn’t going anywhere.

Mt. Baldy is a quaint mountain – I don’t know how else to describe it.  It’s pretty natural – it’s not like they cleared out a bunch of trees and rocks to make wide open trails – instead they left a lot of natural obstacles.  The chairlifts are kind of old too, and known to stop for periods of time.  I’m not sure why the lifts stop, but it’s kind of weird.

It got pretty snowy and windy by the time we eventually made our way to the summit, and getting down was pretty much an exercise in blind snowboarding.  There was so much powder though!  It makes such a huge difference – you really feel like you’re floating through the snow instead of scratching over it.

On the way home we saw the most AMAZING sunset I’ve ever seen.  I couldn’t believe it.  I took pictures but it just doesn’t do it justice at all.  The sky opened up in multiple layers of orange, purple, and blue.  It was intense.  Honestly I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more beautiful sunset.

Looks like we’re going to hit Mt. High tomorrow for round two, trying to take advantage of all the new snow while we can!  Since we had so much rain recently we have to wait a bit to surf since all that rainwater causes massive amounts of polluted runoff to drain into the ocean.  This can be pretty dangerous to swim in, and the risk of getting some sort of infection is sadly kind of high.  It’s an unfortunate fact of life here in California.

Well, I really should be doing work, but I’m having a severe crisis of concentration.  So, I guess I’ll post a little update here since I’ve been meaning to anyway.

I just got back from an amazing snowboarding trip to Whistler, Canada.  Whistler is actually technically Whistler Blackcomb.  It’s a ski resort with two mountains (both huge).  Whistler is a mountain, and Blackcomb is a glacier.  Both have incredible terrain and ski runs.  If you started at the top, I believe it would take you about a half hour – 40 minutes to make it all the way to the bottom.  I guess if you were really fast you could do it in less time, but for normal people it takes a LONG time to get all the way down!  Usually you don’t do that though, you just go to one section of the mountain and stay there for a bit.

I went with my friends Val and Lori, and we stayed at Barb’s apartment.  Barb is our friend who moved from San Diego to Whistler this past summer.  She let us stay at her apartment for free, which was awesome!  It was close quarters but we had fun cooking dinners and breakfasts, and having chocolate fondue.

We went for New Year’s, and on New Year’s day we got a foot of fresh powder.  It was snowing nonstop for three days!

My favorite session on the mountain was when Barb took us to the alpine area called 7th Heaven.  It starts above the treeline and then opens up into a sloping meadow of open runs and copses of trees.   We went through a few stands of trees which was challenging.  Tree riding means trying to find a path between the trunks and navigating the powder in between.  Often there are already gouges in the snow from others going through the trees, so that adds to the difficulty.  We went through a few narrow keyholes where it was basically only as wide as my board and tree trunks were whizzing by inches from my head.  (Yes, I do wear a helmet)

At The Entrance To The Whistler Olympic Park (L to R: Myself, Barb, Lori, and Val)

The Winter Olympics are going to take place in Vancouver and Whistler this year, so we got to take in all the improvements and construction going in to the preparation for the games.  Unfortunately we couldn’t really see the Whistler Olympic park because they had shut it down for security measures.  It’s kind of sad that the world is like that now, but such is life I guess.

L to R, Me, Lori, Val - Riding the lift

Winter Wonderland on Blackcomb

I can’t wait to go back!  I had a great time.

The only problem I had during the trip is that Lori unfortunately got a cold the night before we left, and both Barb and I caught it.  So I’m sick yet again!!  Fortunately it wasn’t bad enough to stop me from snowboarding.  It was just annoying that my nose was running all the time.

Actually, I felt *great* when I was on the hill, in terms of my body.  I didn’t even get that sore!  Last year when I went to Whistler I got so incredibly sore that I couldn’t move.  I don’t know if it’s because we were doing shorter days or what, but my legs felt pretty strong the whole time.  Maybe my snowboarding technique is just better so that I put less strain on my muscles.  Who knows!

Hopefully we’ll take a few more boarding trips this Winter.  Val is talking about going to Mammoth, and it sounds really fun.  It’s about 6-7 hours north of San Diego, so it’s a bit of a drive, but I was looking at their website and the mountain looks huge.

I was telling my friends that after officially learning the basics of how to snowboard over the course of 3 trips to Vermont during High School, I pretty much perfected my snowboarding technique on the most dinky little hills in Michigan.  Mt. Brighton was only about 20 minutes away from the U of M, so it was a great place to go just to work on technique and get my kicks for an afternoon.  The only thing is – Mt. Brighton is a converted landfill (aka garbage dump).  It is TINY.  The hill itself is only like 230ft. high!  Let’s just say that it has made me truly appreciate going to a real mountain   I mean, Whistler makes Brighton look like a speck of dust.

Tiny Mt. Brighton

Well, Christmas has come and gone, and I can’t believe it went so fast.  It seems like yesterday that I was having Thanksgiving dinner!

I spent Christmas in Michigan with the family, and it was great.  Getting there and back, however, was a different story.  Delta lost my luggage on the way there, and then rescheduled my returning flight for the next day at 6am.  I officially hate Delta!

It was ridiculous.  When contacting the Delta/Northwest baggage hotline they said they could send an email to the Detroit Metro baggage office to see about the status of my bag.  They said, quote, “we can’t actually call them because we don’t have their phone number.”

Wait, what?  The baggage hotline for  a major airline can’t look up the number for an airport’s baggage office?  Are you kidding me?

Adding insult to injury, they are now charging $20 to check a bag.  Thanks, I just gave you $20 to lose my bag.

Then on the way back it was quite an adventure.  First, the nosecone of the plane was scratched and they had to replace it.  Then, taxiing to the runway we hit a pothole.  The captain got on the intercom and basically told us “That pothole you felt back there was nothing, everything is fine.”

But it wasn’t.  Apparently as we were taxiing around some passengers heard a strange vibration noise from the right engine.  Then the stewardess heard it.  So they stopped the plane and had to get everything looked at.  When we taxied back to the gate and the pilot and mechanics came to the cabin to investigate I kind of knew we weren’t taking off that night.  I didn’t want to fly on that plane anyway – as all this was going down one of the flight attendants said to the other attendant that she would “rather just get off this plane.”  When the FLIGHT ATTENDANT says that, you know you have a bit to worry about.

So we had to go back to the airport, wait on line for an hour, get a hotel voucher for $13 (which was useless because everything was closed), board a shuttle for the hotel, and get 3 hours of sleep before waking up at 3am to make the shuttle for the newly rescheduled 6am flight.  PLUS, adding even more insult to injury, they didn’t let us have access to our checked baggage.  ANOTHER night without any clothes and toiletries.  After we boarded our rescheduled flight we had to wait 2 hours on the runway because they forgot to stock our plane with any beverages or food.  Didn’t much matter to me because they only give any worthwhile food to first class anyway.

In sum:  I hate Delta.  They gave us a $100 voucher for future use with their airline.  Thanks but no thanks.  In another few months all that $100 is going to be good for is checking a bag.

Well, enough about that.

I’m currently up in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada, for a weeklong snowboarding trip with my friends Lori, Barb, and Val.  We are staying at Barb’s fantastic apartment for free.  New powder is expected for New Year’s Day.  I’m so excited!

I will update hopefully with some more news about the trip.

I’ve gotta say, even though it’s nice to travel, I will be so happy to finally get home after this trip and get back into a regular routine and schedule.  I just want to relax, and for me it’s hard to do that when I’m traveling – especially sports traveling like surf trips and snowboard trips, where people want to make the most of their time and you can’t always make your own schedule.