Entries Tagged 'Sports' ↓

It snowed about 6 inches today, so in another attempt to imagine better weather here are some pictures from the school team traveling down to sectionals in Pocatello from a couple weeks back.

I have discovered that when you’re taking pictures of Ultimate you are not playing Ultimate. Hence I didn’t take that many pictures.

I thought this was an interesting peek into life at Montana State. In the middle of the school day yesterday you go outside and see a giant man-made mound of scaffolding, hay bales, and snow setup directly in front of the library.

This went on for about an hour around lunch time, with giant speakers and a DJ playing music as baggy-pants clad bro-bras put on a show for the crowd.

I must give homage to biking on the Blue Ridge Parkway Ride with Davy, Chris, Binky, and Gary. Good times.

Here are 22 more pictures in a rar file

Bridger Opened last Friday, but due to school I wasn’t able to go until today. They are reporting 80 inches of snowfall so far for the season, which is roughly a third of what fell all of last year.

Another weekend almost finished and another Monday looming. It has been warm here and is supposedly going to be in the 50’s all this week. I guess ski season will have to wait a little while longer. There is still some snow up high but its fading in the warm weather.

I’ve included a couple pictures from the round of folf (frisbee+golf)) Kez, Luke, and I played today.

School is going well. It is a little to believe the semester is more than half over with. That will mark the halfway point of the degree I’m trying to get. Goes by crazy fast dawg, crazy fast.

Lastly, I miss everyone on the East Coast. As much as I love everything out here it can be hard at times to be so far away from my family and friends. Not being a huge phone talker means I get fairly behind on the news. I hope anyone who actually reads this is doing well and I’m looking forward to being back in the Tar Heel State, however briefly, in December.

I woke up this morning and there was snow on the ground and snow falling rather rapidly. That was certainly a first, in Breckenridge it snowed a foot when we left on May 1st but up until now that was the latest snow I’d ever seen.

The town hosted the 22nd Bozofest this weekend, which is an Ultimate (frisbee) tournament. Technically it is just called “Ultimate” because the word “frisbee” is copyrighted. Teams came from places such as Salt Lake City, Portland, and Edmonton (in Canada), quite a drive for some people.

It was a exciting (and tiring) weekend of Ultimate and revelry in 2 days of warm and sunny weather. This was mildly astounding considering that the weather was cold and rainy all last week. It then proceeded to be about as nice as you could possibly want for exactly two days, then Memorial day was cold and rainy, and today it was snowing. Mother Nature must have wanted us to play some frisbee!

There was a fun party for the tournament (this an Ultimate tradition) about 30 minutes outside of town with kegs of beer, a bonfire, a live band, and spaghetti dinner. It was out in the country with horses and cows, and anyone that wanted to could camp in a nearby field. I managed to get my honda stuck in said field after I slightly overestimated its off-roading capabilities. But luckily thats what teammates are for isn’t it? Especially largish Ultimate players. Thanks to all the Bozos that assisted in unsticking me.

Mom and Dad are going to be here in a week. Also of note I now have a plane ticket to go visit Davy during the beginning of July.

After that I’m going to be back in Asheville during the first couple weeks of August. It should be a good summer.

Here are a couple of totally non Ultimate related pictures of a hike Kez and I did last week up to the top of Baldy Moutain. The last time I was up there was in September of last year, it is a tough hike towards the end but once you get up there it has some good views.

I just got back from a trip to South Dakota to Kezia’s hometown of Rapid City, South Dakota. We did a little bit of horseback riding, were well taken care of by her family, and managed to get in climbing on three separate days in the very wonderful Needle formations.

It was a grand trip. I hope you enjoy the pictures.

Here are a couple of shots from the climb Joe and I did Monday afternoon. The climb is called the Gallatin Tower and is located down Gallatin Canyon as you go towards Yellowstone NP and Big Sky ski resort. It was a great way to spend a relatively warm afternoon in Bozeman. I recognize the beard is getting a little out of hand. I’m going to do someting about that one of these days.

Its been a good week. Busy, but good. On Thursday I went rock climbing at one of the closest local areas, Practice Rock, with Joe and Luke. I had been there before but not since winter had arrived. I was quite proud of myself as I did my first 2 lead climbs using “traditional” protection. (You climb up with the rope trailing you, place protection in the rock, clip yourself to it, and keep climbing ) Leading a climb is more difficult (and scary) than being the 2nd person up. And trad climbing is another level of difficulty above just sport climbing (sport is where there are pre-placed bolts that you the clip the rope to as you climb)

It was a lot of fun and makes me look that much forward to summer where hopefully I’ll become familiar with all the local areas around here. I found out that the class I’m teaching is only 3 days a week. I did a fair amount of climbing when I was going to school in Chapel Hill, and not much since then. It has been a good to return to something I enjoyed so much.

There was also a “Pow Wow” here at MSU this weekend, about a block from my house in the basketball complex. I’d never been to one but I believe they are much more frequent in the western part of the country. It was really interesting, and I could go on for awhile about that as well. However, for the sake of brevity here are a couple of low-quality films shot by my camera and then sent through You Tube to make sure they end up looking extra cruddy.

Enjoy!

Thats the report from their website. I was already planning on going today anyways and with the new snow it turned out to be pretty epic. I think that was the most snow I’ve ever been in. There would be times where you would be up to your waist going downhill and snow would be totally covering your face. You would be inhaling snow and just totally blinded. It was a little crazy. It’s like you’re floating, you move up and down as you turn but you don’t actually hit anything hard.

I was proud of myself today for getting myself in the position where sometimes I can go to school, teach my own class, and learn quite a bit in the process, and then other times I can drive 25 minutes to a mountain where I can have some of the best snowboarding of my life.

Here’s a little video I took on my very last run. I think I almost got frostbite trying to get this video. Ok, not really, but my hand was definitely in pain afterwords. You’ll notice that I’m basically following someone else’s path. This is because if it wasn’t quite steep, there was so much snow that it was quite difficult to make forward progress unless you were mostly following where someone else had already been .

Also, thanks for all the birthday well-wishes, I felt very loved.

Back in Bozeman. Things are calming down as I catch up. Vegas was quite interesting.

Some highlights:

• Our team (the Rum Runners) went 6-2 over Friday-Sunday
• Got stuck in an elevator with 22 other people for an hour and a half (more will come on this)
• Saw some standard Vegas sights, the fountains at the Bellagio hotel, an audio-anamatronic Zeus and friends pop out of a fountain inside Ceasar’s Palace
• Lost 2 dollars gambling
• Enjoyed 80 degree weather for a 3 days
• Spent 3 hours driving the final 80 miles home, (arriving at 3 am), on a snow-covered interstate
• General marveling at the train-wreck of civilization that is Las Vegas

And much more!

Right now I’m trying to stay on top of my game so I can go to Bridger tomorrow, because it has snowed about 4 feet there in the month of February, including about 3 in the last week. So there is a lot of freshy pow-pow out there waiting for me.

According to their website. Bridger has gotten about 20″ of new snow since wednesday. Which has made for an excellent, tiring, and brief, weekend. There are so many places to explore out there. I feel like everytime I go I find something new. Its a seriously different mountain then Breckenridge was. Even though its a lot smaller I would say Bridger has a lot more varied terrain.

Something I have yet to do it hike to the top and ride down the ridge. Coming down from the ridge requires a mandatory hike because the lifts don’t go all the way. Also,  you are required to to carry a shovel and avalanche tranceiver (to find others and be found, just in case). I was reading a book on hiking the ridge called “Steppin’ Up”, describing the different descending routes. I found it interesting that on more than a few, a 20-30 ft huck off a cliff was casually mentioned as required. Thankfully, not every thing is that crazy and I shall be seeking one of the more tame ways to be my introduction.

I took this picture of a cloud from my car window as I came into the parking lot this morning at Bridger. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen something like that. The cruddy cell phone picture does not do it justice, it was a spectacular cloud.

Here are a couple of video’s I took a Bridger a while back. These were the first two video’s I’ve ever taken with my camera while snowboarding, which is not a particularly easy thing to do. Even though my camera takes pretty decent movies it is quite awkward to hold.

Don’t worry Mom, both of these were taken in the safest possible manner. Hopefully my including these video’s here will inspire the weather to produce snow here because we could use some.