White Stuff EVERYWHERE!!

My 2004/2005 Snowboarding Season

Brian and Ty setting up the Christmas tree in the Cabin

We waddled out of the restaurant, headed back to the cabin to enjoy the fire and to laugh at Steve’s boots. For a time, 2003-2005, there was a fashion trend in California that centered on these sheepskin boots made in Australia called Uggs. They were really warm and plush on the inside and would have been great for late fall, winter and early spring evenings around the house in someplace like Montana or Idaho. How they became all the rage in sunny, warm southern California, I am not real sure. You would see young girls, and women who wished they were still young, wearing them with hip-hugger jeans or greyhound (an inch from the ‘hare’…) mini skirts. Anyway, that afternoon after we got back to the cabin and were getting ready for dinner, Steve walked down from the loft sporting a pair of extra-tall Uggs. Everyone laughed. He tried to defend himself with the argument of them being warm and toasty and he tried to sway us with the fact that they come in men’s sizes. High heal pumps are made in men’s sizes too… We teased him about them mercilessly, to the point that he just ignored us and our taunting. Of course, we just teased him harder for the rest of the weekend. What else are friends for?

The boarding that day was GREAT! We hit run after run, nailed jumps and boxes, and dropped into powdery-fast creek beds. Laurel was fantastic on her board (it was the first time we had ridden together) and was smooth in the turns. Brauning hit every little shelf like a proper jump and Brian, in addition to boarding like a champ, kept us all laughing while riding the lift. The sun was shinning, we were with friends, it wasn’t too cold, and it was a great day spent boarding.

Overall the trip was killer and I love the size of Mammoth, the number of runs and the consistent conditions there. I enjoyed the laughter, the friendship, the battles won and even the money lost.

I was in Colorado last year for New Years Day and I thought that it was time to make it a tradition. I had an eventful Christmas Vacation with lots of traveling and family stuff. I thought it would be nice for Laurel and I to hang out with some friends, be adults, laugh at ourselves and spend some quality time on the snow together. We flew into Denver and our buddy Brauning met us at the Airport on New Years Eve around 7:00 PM. Brauning was welcome on most all of our trips. He loves Colorado almost as much as me so he was all in when I invited him along. We left the airport and headed directly to my buddy Flood’s house and then on to his girlfriend’s (Amy) vacation cabin in Breckenridge. We were all tired, so there wasn’t a whole lot of partying that night. Not by us anyway. There was a group of Amy’s friends there who were well into party mode when we arrived. At some point, someone popped in a Neil Diamond’s Greatest Hits CD and every single one of them, all under 40, started singing Red, Red Wine and Heartlight from memory, linking arms and swaying with the music. It was all very surreal and reminded me of going to concerts with my parents in the 80’s before I was old enough to know that I could say no or to fake being sick so that I could spare myself the misery.

Our group stayed up just long enough to see the ball drop on TV in Time Square and we all slept well enough that night. The next morning was a bit of a pain: I had to rent boards and boots and get lift tickets. With all the travel for Christmas, Laurel and I couldn’t bring our own gear and Brauning couldn’t be talked into bringing our board bag on his flight – “it is too heavy…” – The selfish bastard. Anyway, we didn’t get to the runs until almost 11:00. Flood HATED skiing, but saw it as a necessary evil. He loved back country winter travel and his girlfriend is an avid skier, so he had to at least attempt to try to ski. He had a three day pass for the lifts, but the resort wasn’t honoring it on New Years Day. Flood wasn’t about to PAY for a day out in the snow. We all begged him to break down and spend a little money, just that once to which he replied in his normal laidback drawl, “What?! Hiking is best part of the whole day.” At which point the crazy bastard shouldered his skis and walked up the run. He hiked back uphill almost all day in hard plastic ski boots and I am completely sure he had a genuine smile on his face and a song in his heart the whole time. Flood had always had a different idea of just exactly a “good time” meant. He was happiest outside while punishing himself on trail while those around him have withered from the exposure, heat, bugs, poison ivy, snakes or shear exhaustion.

The runs were broad and the lift lines were short that day. We were riding through some trees on the edge of a run around 3:00 when Brauning headed into a fast sharp turn. It all looked good until the very last possible second: his board jumped up and went around to one side of a tree and his body went to the other. He nailed a medium sized birch tree with his left thigh and from my vantage point, I just knew he had broken his leg. I skidded to a stop beside where he was laying, checked him over and after seeing that he was ok, started to make fun of him relentlessly. He has a long painful and sorted history with trees…

We all had a good time, even Flood with his short skis and his hiking. The snow was so-so, it was really windy, some of the runs were more than a little icy and it was really cold. At our home mountain in California, Mammoth, it had started snowing just after Christmas and didn’t let up for a week. They got four feet of fresh wonderful fluffy stuff while we were in Colorado. Of course Brauning mentioned the conditions at Mammoth at least 10 times that day while he slid down the hill using his own board. I stopped being mad about him not wanting to bring our gear after his altercation with the tree - Karma. While the conditions could have been better that particular day, it was kick-ass to get on the snow with some great friends and to board on a new mountain. Laurel and I took off for home a couple of days later, but Brauning stayed for a week of climbing, boarding and enjoying the Colorado winter.

The details of January are kind of fuzzy – deadline were killing me and I was getting geared up to do some serious traveling for work, Christmas had just come and gone and I was getting a bit frayed at the ends. My buddy Brian wanted to get out and play in the snow while the powder was still falling. I thought that a day of falling gracefully onto my face in the snow was just what I needed. On Monday we made our plans to ride at Bear Mountain (an hour and a half away) for the next weekend. By Tuesday, Brauning was in. On Wednesday the weather forecast was calling for snow in the mountains. On Thursday, Brian informed us that something had come up and wouldn’t be able to afford the trip. This outing was partially his idea. Brauning and I conferred a bit and decided that we would spot him the lift ticket and the gas money for the trip just so he could be there to hang out with us. He still protested and that led us to invoke a hard and fast rule among our group of friends: If the trip is free, you can’t say no and you HAVE to go. There are exclusions for funerals, birth of one’s first child, a honeymoon and broken bones, but no other excuses will cut it. Work? That is what “sick days” are for. Wife/girlfriend/boyfriend? One just has to go and deal with the consequences when they come home. Sick pet? That is why one has family. Those points made, Brian was in.

On Friday it started snowing above 4,000 feet and by Saturday, roads were being closed. Fresh deep powder that close to home?! Nothing was going to stop me from playing on that hill. There was a party at Brauning’s house that Friday night and Brian tended the bar, as usual. I stayed home and went to bed early after packing all my gear and a soak in the hot tub. The party’s host turned in early, but Brian apparently was a madman until 4:00 that morning. At a quarter till 6:00 AM, I opened the front door, waded over the sleeping/passed out masses to wake the boys up. Brauning was ready to go, but Brian was nowhere to be found. Brauning loaded the car while I called Brian’s cell phone again and again. After waiting for thirty minutes past our departure time and because we hadn’t heard from Brian, we left. We didn’t get a mile down the road before my phone started ringing. It was Brian. He had spent the night out with a young lady and was running behind. Apparently, he hadn’t been to sleep yet, because when we turned around and met him back at the house he looked like warmed over death. I helped Brauning pour him into the backseat of the Subaru and we didn’t hear much out of him until we got to the Highway Patrol checkpoint about halfway up the mountain an hour and a half later. After they made sure we had tire-chains we drove directly to a small quaint espresso house that we know of outside of Arrow Bear. Brian got a mad-tall white mocha with five shots of espresso in it, really - five shots! I thought that much caffeine in one sitting would make someone’s head explode, but it just seemed to wake Brian up a little. It must have been a Hell of a party!

We were on the lifts at 8:00 when they opened and the conditions were amazing! Some of the runs were trackless and we hit every one on both sides of the mountain by noon. There were almost no lift lines that day so we went full throttle the whole time. We broke for lunch and after eating and staring at the Suicide Girl-ish boarding bunnies, Brian was losing his grasp on consciousness. Brauning and I forced some foul coffee spiced with even fouler hot cocoa into him and he was better after a minute or two. The powder was calling us and we headed back up. We ran creeks, the terrain park, nailed jumps, and made our own fresh tracks through the trees. I had never seen conditions like that at Bear Mountain/Snow Summit and we tried to make the most of it. Even when the snow was blowing in sideways, filling in our tracks and leaving us with ten feet of visibility, we were still on the lifts and bombing down the runs.

I went down hard at some point late in the afternoon after heal edging a landing from a mid-sized jump. My ass hurt SO BAD. It felt like Jack Nicholas had tried to remove my left butt cheek with a pitching wedge. I barely made it to a snow bank near a mid-mountain lift before collapsing backward into it to give my nether regions some icy relief. The other two boys fell down beside me and we sat there enjoying the relief and throwing snow balls for ten minutes or so. When I got up, it was like the will to propel my self forward had been left in that snow bank. Brauning was still on his feet, but not looking too spry and Brian looked like the walking dead. We made it down two more runs before calling it quits around 4:00. Brian was asleep before we even left the parking lot. That was the last really great snow that Big Bear had that winter. Some of us went back in March and it was still good, but nothing like the conditions that we experienced in January. I hope to have more weekends like that, with those conditions, that close to home next year.

I love to ride down a mountain on a snowboard. It just feels good to move that fast over the pure white fluffy snow. I am not a huge fan of lift lines, but they are a necessary evil. Or are they? My usual partner in crime/belay-bitch, Matt Brauning and I were training for a non-technical ascent of a big mountain and wanted to get a few winter ascents under our belts in case we might happen to find ourselves on a patch of snow or ice during our upcoming ascent. We had summited Mt. San Jacinto the summer before and thought it would be a good warm up. A first step as it were and it would have been nice to maybe snowboard down as well.

The last weekend in February was PERFECT for our summit bid: Seven feet of fresh snow, warm temperatures and sunshine. We drove into Palm Springs that Friday night and had a bite to eat and watched a movie. We parked Brauning’s Subaru at the gate on the road that leads to a gondola. It takes visitors to a flat area about three-quarters of the way up the mountain. We were aboard for the first trip up the next morning. After signing in at the ranger station, we were off. I convinced Brauning, after speaking to two forest rangers, to leave his snowboard at home because of a supposed avalanche danger around 7,500’. The hike in was five miles of almost trackless snow, bright sun and only a slight breeze. We got a little turned around at Round Valley because the trail to the summit from there was under seven feet of fresh snow. We got back on track by following a couple of uptight Army Reserve officers with a GPS unit. We left them huffing, puffing and hurting to keep up with us as soon as we were out of the trees and could see the peak. They were loaded down pretty heavy and just couldn’t maintain our pace. Later, as we were sitting down on a break and enjoying a Clif Bar, we could hear one of them in the distance throwing up what sounded like his brakfast, his dinner the night before and maybe part of his soul. Poor Bastards…

Brauning in Round Valley, standing on the seven feet of fresh powder with the summit in the background.

His rental snowshoe finally gave up the ghost just before we hit the woods on the decent. Man, he was pissed and said vile, hateful things about the shoes. We strapped and taped them on as best we could, but it still slowed us down until we got to the hard pack trail and strapped on our crampons. By then, three of four groups had passed us on the way back to the tram. We ran almost the rest of the way back and only stopped running when the trail turned to concrete sidewalk. We stowed our gear and started the steep twisting walk up to the tram station. Brauning looked up after about twenty yards and took off, almost sprinting. He looked like a Hobo, tied-on pots and gear clanking, running for the last outbound train. I followed, out of shear amazement the he had enough left in him to run, and when we got to the door of the station, I asked him in between quick breaths what had gotten into him. He said, “I saw those two Army guys ahead of us and there was NO WAY that they were going to beat us back after the way [we] schooled [them] on the trail up”. I felt like the Emperor Palpatine, watching little Anakin Skywalker embrace the Dark Side…

Bad visibility and my board strapped on my back. Click on the image for a larger view.

Brauning on his way up to the summit for the second time in eight days.

Brauning and I just above McCoy Station at Mammoth on a fine day.