Playing catch up. Building the brand. Holding onto memories.
These are from a trip to the Salt Lake area for Christmas last year.
Much shredding while Mom was hospitalized for heart issues. Very scary at the time but it was needed medical attention and a year later she’s doing great.
I can’t think of anything I would rather have done on my 30th birthday.
Saturday, February 27th was my 30th birthday. To lessen the mental trauma of such a milestone in my journey to oldmandom, plans were devised to slide on snow. My brother Davy flew in from San Jose to celebrate the occasion. Jeff drove in from Denver with his friend Robert. Friday, my pre-birthday, was a sunny day in Bozeman and we were all at Bridger.
This was the scene in the middle afternoon out in front of the library at MSU Bozeman last Thursday.
It makes me feel old to wonder why these kids are wearing what they are wearing. The gnome look seems to be in this year.
I believe this was put on by a fraternity..(Sigma ????) to raise money for cancer.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Its been a good weekend. Yesterday it snowed hard all day long and made for a wonderful (and tiring) day. Today offered another chance to explore the slopes of Bridger Bowl. Now that school has started I have to make the most of the weekends because my opportunities have been reduced.
Here are some pictures I took today. It was a lovely sunny day and the new snow was looking mighty fine. The drive to Bridger is quite nice as well. You go through a little pass and to the other side of those mountains that you see in the first picture there and you are in a fairly rural and scenic valley with a number of small farms with horses, cattle, large hay bales and the like. It would be an excellent place to own a house, that is for sure.
So school starts back tomorrow and I have my longest day of the week. Two classes to take, one to teach, and an hour to spend in our school’s math learning center. But it’s all over at 2 so thats not bad at all. Not a whole lot of homework due yet and the class I’m teaching is still at the introductory part so everything is faily mellow.
