Between lack of snow, finals, and vacation, I didn't get to go snowboarding since Kirkwood's opening day, but I fixed that last weekend.
- Date(s): Saturday January 11th and Sunday January 12th.
- People: Car ride there: Jason, Rohit, Matt D., me. Car ride back: Tyler, Dave, Ben, Trisha, me. All of the mountain both days: lots of people from work.
I had a fantastic weekend, and really pushed myself to try new things. I was all over the mountain in places I'd never seen. Here's the short recipe for my weekend:
- Acquire and wear a helmet.
- Attempt gullies, jumps, and lots of other terrain you've never tried before.
- Repeatedly smack your helmet-covered head into anything that gets in the way.
There's a lot I could say about the trip, but I'm going to try to limit my comments to the snowboarding, because otherwise this would be a simply epic post. Besides, I already got my other comments out of my system elsewhere. If you want to attempt to follow along with my exploits at home, here's Kirkwood's trail map. Please note that you can click on it and see a zoomed in version. Once again, this is going to be mostly banal details that will probably only be interesting to maybe 2.7 of you. More for my memory than your enjoyment, etc, etc.
Saturday
After a few reassuring runs down Solitude/Mokelumne/etc below lift 5, I ventured up Cornice. However, instead of heading straight down towards Solitude, I went left and stayed mostly under the lift. This was foolish, because that turned out to be where they keep all the moguls, which served to quickly tire me out pretty early on Saturday. I was falling a lot on these moguls, and I discovered that sunglasses work well if I'm not having issues, sunglasses really aren't very effective when you're falling. Once they're snow encrusted, I just took them off until I made it back to the lift or got up the motivation to actually clean them.
I finally got past the mess of moguls only to find myself of a gully which I'd seen from the lift and considered going down, but was still pretty nervous about. I came up to it with too much speed, though, and ended up partially in it, to the point that getting out would have been an awful lot of work. The helmet didn't enter into my conscious decision, but I'm sure that played a pretty big subconscious factor, and I decided to just go for it. I pointed downhill and set off into the gully, which turned out to be amazingly fun and much easier than I was expecting. It was great for building my confidence and making me feel better about my skill level without being too difficult.
I did that gully once more before heading over to The Reut. Off of the lift, I veered right, because that's the side of the chair I was on. I normally go severely left off of this chair, but going right, I found myself at the head of a huge gully. Shrugging with my newfound confidence, I strapped on my board and slid my way into this gully, which was much longer and more interesting than the gully under Cornice. I did this gully repeatedly until lunch. I didn't even go down the cruisers under The Reut, I was having so much fun with the gully. There was a little jump carved out at the end of the gully that I kind of tried a few times, but never with enough speed to catch much air.
After lunch, I went up The Reut a few more times, and then I built up my courage and went up The Wall. The Wall is big and steep and scary, so I was understandably nervous. Getting off the chair was awfully exciting, because it was really windy, and the ground was pretty icy, and more. I strapped in and tipped myself over the edge, without really giving much thought to what I was really doing. I basically went down right under the lift, because my target was once again the gully under The Reut. There were kind of mini-moguls which weren't nearly as bad as the mess under Cornice, so I wasn't falling nearly as much (though I did fall plenty). I wasn't edging down the slope -- I was more heel edge surfing back and forth -- but I didn't feel *that* bad about it, because I wasn't just heel-sliding down the bumps. Even if it was all on my heel edge, I was at least trying to surf the bumps back and forth.
I headed back up The Wall, figuring then was as good a time as any. In line for the lift just then, I saw Dave and hollered that I'd meet him at the top. I waited for a long while, and eventually Dave, Tyler, and Ben showed up. They said they were planning to head over to Eagle Bowl off to the right of The Wall, and up for trying as much new terrain as possible, I blindly followed them. Instead of going straight down into Eagle Bowl, however, they were planning on traversing to the left of Eagle Bowl to go play with some jumps. On my snowboard, I ended up falling fairly far below them on the traverse, and at one point I ended up in the middle of some trees near the top of lift 1, above Caple's Crest. Despite ending up below them, all three of them commented that they were impressed with how much better I was doing than last season.
I was stuck way below my cohort's intended path, so I did something very stupid: I took off my snowboard and went to stand up, but in the powder it turned out that I didn't have a hold on my snowboard after all, and since my leash is too short to actually be worn while walking, I had taken that off, too. I watched my snowboard zoomzip down the hill and shouted "I lost my snowboard" to Tyler as I started leaping down the hill after it. I crossed a flat traverse where I met up with Dave, and we were just able to make out the Orange of my snowboard way down nearly next to lift 2. It had thankfully hit a tree and got stuck before it really got out of control, but I still had to trudge probably nearly a thousand feet down the hill to my snowboard, and then up and across several hundred feet more to get to a reasonable position to traverse back towards The Reut and meet up with DBT. In retrospect, I probably should have just gone on chair 2, because DBT ended up going back towards Eagle Bowl to play with jumps again, which my legs were far too tired for at this point. I actually collapsed at the snow at one point, the climb was so exhausting.
In the end, I just ended up taking one more run down the cruisers on The Reut. Despite being exhausted, I zoomed down this run which seemed so easy now, though it seemed so hard when I first tried it in March. Then I traversed across Home Run back to Timber Creek where I promptly collapsed into the snow for a long time and waited for people to show up.
Sunday
Lift 7 was running again, so Trisha and I ran up that a few times and played with the mini terrain park (some speedbumps and two smallish jumps at the end) there. I hadn't (and still haven't) gone off of a real jump before, so this was somewhat troubling for me. In the end, I ended up going off the sides of the jumps a few times, never really catching much air, but not really falling either. The tops of the jumps were somewhat surprising. Instead of being a triangle like I thought, they were actually more trapezoidal, with a downhill flat before a steep bank after that. Also, I realize just now that I never actually visualized myself going off of and landing the jump, so that's something I'll need to do before next time.
After a few more aborted jumps, we decided to head over to some gullies to get our confidence up. We traversed over and went in the gully under Cornice, and then we went up Solitude and traversed across to The Drain. I hadn't been to The Drain before, and it turned out to be what seemed like a riverbed with some pretty interesting terrain. I tried going off of a jump and failed the landing pretty badly, and crashed pretty hard a few more times before I made it out, but I had a lot of fun. After a run down The Reut's gully, we headed up Solitude to traverse back across Home Run to Timber Creek, but I traversed too low and ended up back at the head of the gully under Cornice. I pushed myself out (without taking my snowboard off this time, and then pushed myself up a hill so I could get some speed, but I still didn't get enough to really make it across the traverse. I dropped blindly into a gully which was pointing in the right direction, just for the sake of getting some speed, and I eventually was able to climb out of the bully and back up onto the traverse and eventually I got back to Timber Creek.
We decided on a short day, but Tyler and I wanted to do a few more runs. We traversed and then went up Cornice and traversed across to The Drain. I failed to land the same jump as the first time, but this time a skier tried it right behind me, and I had to roll out of the way to avoid being landed on. The skier fell, too, but thankfully we didn't hit each other. I again fell several more times in The Drain, and at this point was really feeling the exhaustion of all the new things I'd been trying set in.
We took one last run up Cornice and traversed across the peak to Sentinel Bowl. Unfortunately, this was a long flat, and I'd been having trouble with skating as it was, so this finished off what little strength I had left in my legs. The wind at the peak did make for an interesting (though mostly failed) experiment in para-boarding, though.
Finally I made it to the top of Sentinel Bowl, and went over the edge. I was so tired, however, that I fell onto my back trying to edge. I pushed myself back up, but I pushed too hard and ended up falling onto my face, and I proceeded to slide down about 2/3rds of Sentinal Bowl, face first, on my belly. Tyler and Navid came up behind me, proclaiming that it was the funniest thing they'd seen all day, and wishing that they'd had a camera, etc. I stuck to my heel edge the rest of the way down the slope, having completely forsaken edging for the rest of the day. I just couldn't manage it. Once we got to some flatter cruisers, I did try edging and playing with bumps a little, but I didn't have much strength left in me to do anything interesting.
Conclusions and Goals
Overall, I had an awesome weekend, and did lots of new stuff that I was scared to do without a helmet, and am looking forward to more. In particular, I want revenge on Sentinel Bowl. =) We're planning on going up on Monday, it looks like, and my flight plan will probably be something like: 7, traverse, go up Cornice, traverse, go down The Drain, go up Cornice, and then traverse to Sentinel Bowl. The sooner in the day I hit that thing the better, because then I won't be tired. After that, I'll go play with jumps, either off of lift 7, or in The Drain, depending on how I'm feeling. My goals for Monday are:
- Do a reasonable job down Sentinel Bowl.
- Go over the top of a park jump, catch some air, and land it.
- Time permitting, explore some new terrain off of The Wall. In particular, try traversing left to the chutes that drop into The Drain.
