Winter Sports 2008/2009 Season

[BailOut]

This thread is a place where all of we "Children of Winter" can discuss our outings, endeavors, exploits, plans, etc. Pictures/video are encouraged.

I'll start.

While only one run and one small park is open so far my local ski area, Mount Rose Ski Tahoe (http://www.mtrose.com) has indeed opened. I spent some time there on Thursday and Friday before work, and yesterday I had my Little Brother out there for his first day on the slopes and his first time on a snowboard. By the end of the session he was able to do a heelside scrape on his own about 50% of the time - not bad at all for a kid on his first day.

The snow is currently mostly man-made stuff on top of a meager natural fall base, and it is icy as all get out in the morning but then the days are so unseasonably warm right now that it turns to a slush-like consistency by about 1000. Nonetheless it feels good to be on a board again and I have some advanced balance and edge control skills to work on that can be done on the one green that's open.

Later this season a friend of mine who is both an expert skier and an expert snowboarder (I still do not know why he never went professional), David, plans on leading me and my friend Matt out to the back country as well as to some of his favorite ski areas in Utah. Matt and I are in shape for this as we have been mountain biking for the entirety of the off season, but it will still be a challenge as neither of us have been on snowshoes before, let alone skied or boarded anything gnarlier than between the trees in local ski areas. I have yet to tackle a double black as well (this is only my second season so I do not feel bad about that at all).

Yesterday (Saturday) David was the one that instructed my Little, age 11, along with his own son, age 10, and it was in this time that he gave me the new skills to work on that I mentioned earlier. He also encouraged me to try a man-made terrain park feature for the first time, which I did.

It was a box about a foot tall that had an ultra-slick surface. I went straight over it the first time to get a feel for having to balance on my board without being able to manipulate its position, and that went fine. This gave me the confidence to try to hit it sideways on my next run, and that didn't go so well. I got sideways without a problem but then failed to transition back forward in time and plowed the landing. Thank goodness for helmets.

As I mentioned earlier David also gave me some skills to work on as the first part of ramping me up to an expert level on a board. So far I do this thing where I get a hint of an edge and then play with smoothly shifting my weight between feet and at different places above the board, seeing if I can follow the terrain at speed and in a controlled fashion without ever lifting an edge into the air. Once I get that dialed in I advance to playing with all my weight on one foot at a time so that I can, for example, transition to switch quickly without ever causing friction. This will come in handy on the steep stuff as I will be able to quickly transition my weight and board anywhere I need it to be. Once I get a feel for that I advance to trying to ride purely on the edges like an alpine boarder does with their specialized board, which allows you to carve S turns without ever losing speed. This requires precision balance and control that will take me some time to build up. After one attempt at this set of trials I did alright on the precision flexing but started crashing on the weighted transitions, and by the time I was trying to ride on my edge I was flailing like a rag doll and going down every few seconds. Today I am almost as sore as I was after my first day on a board.

I am not a young man anymore (I am 36 now and have a degenerating disc at L5-S1 that requires occasional corticosteroid injections) but with some homeopathic medications (Arnica Montana for the pain and Arnica Gel for the sore muscles) I am good enough to get back out there again today. I will be taking another close friend of mine, Robert, with me. Robert is the one that helped get me to the level I am at now last season and I always enjoy his company, so I want to get him out there tearing up what there is to get at today. The ski area will be closed Monday through Wednesday each week until more snow falls so for now we need to get at what we can while we can.

Below is a picture that was taken by a staff photographer at the ski area of Matt and I heading to our final run of the opening day last Thursday. This photograph ended up in their web site's hard-to-get-into "Pic of the Day" gallery. I am on the left.

[GeneW]

Winter sports....

1. Defensive driving practice - take the Yaris out and try to recover from skids, slides and other stuff.
2. Snow shoveling - good exercise.
3. Walks in the winter night - peacefully quiet.

Don't bother with downhill skiing though cross country and snowshoing is a lot of fun.

Gene

[BailOut]

The picture I shared above has made it into the revolving 7-picture frame on the home page of the Rose site. Attached is a screen shot.