Christmas Skiing

We had an absolutely gorgeous day skiing on Christmas day with bright sunshine and bitter cold conditions. The snow was a bit slow though and I was wishing I had applied some cold weather wax to my skis but I had a great time anyway. There were hardly any lines to speak of and we got rental skis for my son very quickly.

Here’s Mr. and Mrs. Claus out for a stroll in the snow

We skied mostly blue runs in the morning to warm up. Here’s a view of the mountain that I took from off of the lift. Sometimes you can see some blue ice on the glacier but today it seems that it is mostly covered up from the fresh snowfall or the lighting was not hitting it right.

We spent a couple hundred US dollars on the ski day so I won’t be doing that again this season unless the price of Steem really goes up. Even lunch was almost thirty dollars and left my son feeling like getting seconds halfway through.

“I’m still hungry - if I had my own money I’d go back and get a bowl of that clam chowder in a bread basket; that looked really good”, he said.

“Would you be able to finish it if you did that?”, I asked.

“No, probably not”, he said.

We sat in silence eating our lunch. I had a vegetarian noodle bowl and he had a pulled pork sandwich, chips, most of a large chocolate brownie that we split, and a fizzy sugary drink. I figured he’d be full by the time we were done and at the prices we were paying I didn’t feel like giving him the cash to get a second lunch. Sure enough when we were done he was full.

After lunch we headed back out and I was wanting to get in a few harder black runs before my legs were all tired out. Here’s a view of a double black diamond run that I knew I couldn’t talk my son into doing without a lot of effort. It doesn’t look too impressive here but are some really gnarly steep narrow sections with tree tops, rocks and cliffs. I’d been down it before and conditions were pretty good today for doing it but I didn’t want to drag my son down it forcefully and have him grumpy at me for who knows how long or something.

We joked about me taking pictures of his compound fractures after a major fall and posting them on the Internet - but I would never do that, lol.

Here’s another picture of a single black diamond run I did manage to talk him into doing. This was kind of accidentally taken when I said, “I guess thats enough cheesing for now”. (The camera takes pictures when I say “cheese”.)

Note that my skis are the yellow pair on the left my son’s are on the right and just about the same width even though he weighs about half as much as I do. My skis are shorter and lighter but still fast enough and turn very nicely. I like to ski mostly harder pack powder conditions and bumped up runs.

Our first run on the expert slopes was a nice north facing run with excellent snow conditions and just the right size bumps to be a lot of fun. I let my son ski in front figuring that if he went down I could help him get any skis or poles and get back into his bindings. He was doing great and near the bottom of the run cut right though some deep powder snow. I usually head down the harder packed areas but when I saw him make it through without any issue I figured I’d try following.

I tend to do alright on steep powder slopes but this was almost level with a uphill rise at the end and I figured I would need some speed to make it through. I turned it loose a bit early and hit the powder moving too fast. It was the heavy wet thick stuff typical of around here and both skis sunk into the snow, the bindings came loose and I face planted into the snow seeing stars. It took me awhile to dig out and I skied back looking like frosty the snowman with my ego tucked between my legs and chunks of snowy ice embedded in my helmet.

My son was feeling pretty confident having made it down a run I crashed horribly on so it was fairly easy to talk him into doing the other run shown above. It is a bit technical in that it slopes a couple different directions and can get built up with some rather challenging and fun large size bumps.

This was more my turf and my shorter narrower skis could work this slope pretty well. I made it down without incident whereas my son…, crashed a few times, but the snow was soft and he was fine.

Here’s a picture taken near the end of the day. It was really beautiful with the fresh snow on the mountains.

Thanks for reading and looking! I really value your support!
All photos were taken with my Galaxy S7 cell phone.