Easter Sunday

Well it looks as if I'll be spending Easter with Mckell and her family this year. My parents and one of my sisters left for Zion's National Park today to go hiking and camping for a couple of days. Lindsey, my other sister stayed up here and is having a party as I type this. Maybe I should cruise on up and check out what goods they got, or maybe I'll just be the loser I enjoy being sometimes and curl up with a glass of water and my Modern Marvels "Commercial Jet's" show I TiVoed. Yeah, I think I'll do the latter.

So we hit the slopes and went snowboarding today. Holy shit it was amazing! It has been snowing in the mountains now for almost a week and today we finally got a beautiful blue skyed day to enjoy it. I went up with Mckell and her cousine Dale who's in town from California, it was also Mckell's first time up since she got knee surgery over 2 years ago. I had some free passes to Solitude from work so that's where we went. Dale was pretty good for a California kid who has only been a handful of times, and Mckell did really well for not being on the slopes in so long.

Unfortunately there were a few downsides to today though. The first being that I NAILED a kid coming down a run. I was getting towards the bottom of a run that I had just bombed and was coming in fast. As I was going straight down the hill a kid that was out of control came cutting across the entire hill and went straight in front of me. Since I was heading straight down and he came from my back side I didn't see him until it was too late. We slammed into eachother, causing him to pop out of both skis and slam into the ground pretty hard. I managed to stay on my board but had taken a pretty good hit to my left arm and leg. I had to listen to all the idiots telling me I was going too fast etc. when in reality this kid was out of control and going down a hill that he should not have been on. After a few minutes of apologizing to the kid and making sure he was alright (he was about 15 by the way, so not technically a "kid") I went back to the lodge to check out my battle wounds. Apparently he was hurt a little worse than he said, because as I watched from the lodge I saw a couple medics come up to him and start checking him out. We bailed because I was afraid I might get my pass cut, so we went upstairs in the lodge and waited until things cooled off a bit.

The second was that since Mckell was doing great, the three of us decided to take a lift up by Honeycomb Canyon which is nothing but black and double black diamond runs with the exception of one intermediate run. We decided we'd just take the intermediate run called Sol-Bright (I'll come back to this name in a second). When we started going down the run Mckell started having a lot of problems. The run was really narrow and since she was still just re-learning how to carve, she was having some trouble. That coupled with the fact that the runs were very slow and if you stopped you'd have to walk out made it a pretty harsh run. After about an hour we finally saw a lift, the only problem is that it was a Brighton lift, not a Solitude lift. Unbenounced to us, we had taken the Sol-Bright run which was short for the Solitude to Brighton run that people use to go between resorts. After a little over 2 hours we finally arrived in Brightons parking lot and had to take a shuttle bus back to Solitude. Unfortunately after that, we were both a little pissed and pretty tired so we decided to call it a day. Luckily it was already late in the day so we didn't miss out on many more runs.

All in all though it was an amazing day and amazing snow. I still have 2 more free passes to Solitude so we'll probably head up again sometime in the very near future, and this time we'll make same sure we stay the fuck away from Sol-Bright. I recommend you do the same.