Skiing

We left at almost 7:30am for Powder Mountain to go skiing. Jason and I were in the van with Andy, Chelsey, Mom and Dad.

It snowed most of the night and snowed all the way through the afternoon. The roads hadn’t been plowed so it was a slow and scary drive up the mountain. It was so foggy, that we couldn’t even really see where we were going or if we were going the right direction at times. The roads up the mountain were especially bad. We passed a police officer coming down and asked her how the roads were. She replied, “The roads are horrible.” We attempted going up them anyway though after a plow and road salter truck drove past us. Twice I thought we were going to run into cars as we tried to pass them on the road. We had to pass them because they had gotten stopped in the middle of the road, but if we had stopped behind them, we would have never had the momentum to make it up the steep hills. We were still sliding all over the road even with the salt, but without the salt laid down we would have never made it. At the very last hill Andy and Mike had to jump out of the car and push the van up a part of the hill to help us not get stuck. There were a few moments that I really didn’t think we were going to make it up, but I’m very grateful we did. Because of the bad weather and bad roads, it took us three and a half hours to get there.

We went to Powder Mountain because Jeff’s business, Peak Capital, owns a lot of the surrounding lands of the ski resort. Because of that, we received royal treatment. We had several pairs of skis rented for free, plus all of our day/night passes for free, a catered pizza lunch, and access to a Yurt (a tent the size of a front room with couches and a fire going), basically the equivalent of thousands of dollars.

It was snowy and foggy, but it wasn’t extremely cold or windy which was nice. Because of all the recent snow, we were skiing in about 12 inches of fresh powder, which is awesome for experienced skiers and a little unnerving for inexperienced skiers like me. Jason skied most of the afternoon with his brothers and mom while I happily stayed back with two of the sisters-in-law and eight-year-old Dallin.

One time up the ski lift, we had the four of us on one chair. As we were getting off, somehow one of the sisters-in-law bumped the rest of us and the other three of us got carried a little two far past the drop-off point and then fell off into the snow. Now that I think back on it, it must have looked really funny. They had to stop the chair lift and people came down to see if we were okay. I think Dallin got it the worst because one of his skis had come off, but we were all okay.

A little later we went down a path that led us to a tow rope lift. We didn’t know that we were going to that particular tow rope and the only other way down, we were told, was a black diamond. Well, the tow rope was kind of tricky. We waited in a long line and then Dallin was the first to try to get up the hill. He fell flat on his face three times in a row, meanwhile the people behind us were getting ancy. Next Sally went up, but she fell off half-way up the hill and had to come back down. Lisa tried it and fell off and then I tried it and fell off. Finally we let other people go ahead of us in line while we tried to figure out what to do. Sally made it up, Lisa tried again but then had a hard, painful fall. Lisa and I were about to take off our skis and walk up the dumb hill when the attendant convinced us to try one more time. Lisa finally got on and then the attendant helped me get on as well. As soon as I was somewhat situated I looked up ahead of me only to see that Lisa had fallen down but hadn’t let go and was being dragged up the hill backwards and holding on for dear life. It felt like a long trip even though it only lasted about 8 min. but I kept expecting Lisa to fall off. She stuck it out until she was almost to the top and heard someone yell to let go. She finally let go and then furiously tried to roll over in the snow with her skis on to avoid being hit by me coming behind her. Fortunately she wasn’t hurt, but it was a pretty exhausting trip to the top for her. I wished I could have taken a picture of her, but both of my hands were busy holding the tow pole and my ski poles.

I didn’t really fall down much, and when I did, it was a really soft landing into a bunch of powder. It was a lot of fun! We left about 4:30pm and had much better roads going down the mountain, but we still didn’t get home until around 8:00pm.