Last Hurrah

Last Friday I went skiing in the Beartooth Mountains of Wyoming. It was my 101st ski day for the 09-10 season. It took 2.5 hours to drive there from Mammoth and find a good place to make some turns, but it was worth it. I ended up skiing what is locally known as the Gardner Chutes and one of the more popular places to ski on the pass. I took 4 runs, each somewhere between 500 and 700 vertical. It took me about 30 minutes to hike back up after each run and about 1 minute to ski down. The conditions were at best thick potatoes, but it was boot deep, untracked, steep, and mid-June. I'll take it. I'm tempted to go again, but the drive is just a little too far and the conditions just a little too poor to really justify it. So instead I think I'll stick to exploring Yellowstone further and trying to find some summer.

Also in the area was a crew from Toy Soldier Productions, a Montana-based ski film company. They were in the middle of building a huge kicker next to the slopes I was skiing on. Unfortunately the jump was so big they couldn't finish it in a day, so I didn't get to see them session it. From watching the trailer on their website I missed out too, those guys are sic. If the Beartooth session makes the movie trailer, I'm likely buying their film: Come Find Us.

This coming weekend I'll be taking Roo out for its 1st birthday celebratory drive- a tour of the remnants of the Island Park caldera in Idaho that was created by the eruption of Yellowstone volcano 1.3 million years ago. I put over 23,000 miles on Roo in its first year. Not bad.

Blog Fail

So yeah, about this winter, it happened. I wrote nothing on here about it. I thought about doing so a lot, but usually decided not to because the stories I wanted to tell might have incriminated either myself or my employer. Well, maybe not incriminate, but give light to things that really shouldn't be just floating around on the internet. Can't be too careful with that internet. There are photos from the winter up on Facebook at least, and I'll post a favorite here as well.

Of course, I still did a lot of normal, fun things this winter too, but by December blogging had more or less been removed from my mental checklist of things to do when really bored. I went on a hut trip, played a lot of indoor soccer, skied 100 days, and went backcountry skiing around Vail. If blogspot lets me, I'll post the video I made about this winter (it's long).

And now comes the self-promise to post more, as this is a really good way to keep in touch with a lot of friends, mostly through uploading these posts as notes on Facebook, though recently I've been using my Facebook status for that purpose since I know not near as many people read the notes. Still, this definitely remains the forum of choice for details.

Speaking of details, here's what I'll be up to in the coming months and what my future posts will about (or what a long-distant future post will be aplogizing for not covering).

June & July: Back in Yellowstone working as a geologist. Going to finish the project I started last summer and hopefully get a journal article out of it. Watching the world cup and maybe even winning a league basketball game this year (which will probably only happen if the team that always wins lets me play for them).

August and every month after that for the foreseeable future: Graduate school at Arizona State to get my Ph.D. T.A.'ing, doing research, and trying to work in as much ultimate, soccer, hiking, and skiing as my schedule allows.



That's me and my awesome skis, Rossignol Phantom SC97's. Unfortunately I broke them about a week after I took that photo. Fortunately, I got them waranteed and have already received my new replacements, 2010-2011 Rossignol S97's. Sweet.

I broke 3 pairs of skis this winter: the Rossignols (cracked sidewall from cliff hucking), Atomic Tele Skis (too weak for my weight and skiing style, I ripped the binding off mid-turn), and Rossignol SC 80's (hit a rock at A-Basin in May a week after buying these as used demo skis from the shop I worked at). I replaced the tele skis with Dynastar Mythic Riders, which rock. I'm hoping to get a mismatched pair to replace the 80 I destroyed, fingers are crossed.