This weekend I met up with a bunch of Stanford grad school friends from last year to go skiing up in Tahoe. It took me a while to get up to Tahoe on Friday, due to some changes in car arrangements. After much confusion, I ended up hanging out in Berkeley for the evening with one grad school friend and his friend from undergrad, and then catching a ride with one of his other friends much later in the night. I slept the whole way up though, so at least the ride went really quickly.
Saturday, we skiied at Northstar. The snow was ok - icy at parts, especially towards the end of the day, but not as bad as I had expected given the relative lack of snow. And I was able to keep up with everyone else, so it was a pretty good day. The hot tub at the end of the day felt awesome though.
Once we were back at the cabin, there was lots of hottubbing, pasta eating, poker playing and catching up going on. Until I fell asleep on the couch within the first round of Mafia. Apparently people were jumping on me and I still slept through it. Amazing.
Today, when we woke up, there was over a foot of fresh snow on the ground. We headed over to Alpine Meadows to check out the fresh powder conditions. I was super excited to ski on the 18" of snow on the top of the mountain. Until I headed down the first run. I don't think I've ever skiied on anything like that before. And I soon learned that I can't. I fell at least 5 times on my way down and it took me over an hour - I just couldn't turn! Or see anything because of the heavy snow and my sweat fogging up the goggles. I gave up after one run and hung out in the lodge until lunch when everyone else gave up.
Thankfully, it hadn't continued snowing as heavily on the roads and we were able to make it home in some traffic, but pretty good conditions. A great weekend overall.
Posted by dahl at December 18, 2005 11:20 PM
I'm the same way in conditions of new snow. I can ski blues when there are no snow on them but put 5 inches of snow and I fall down every five mins.