Girl Gets Board

With reports of 8″ of snow on Monday from Stevens Pass, I headed out with my friends William, Teresa, and Lola to get some runs in. Lola is one, but she loves playing in the snow so Teresa and Lola stayed at the lodge while William and I headed out to see what we could find.

After a super fun day in the park on Saturday at the International Ladies Shred Day, I set out to work on one of my season goals-learn how to ride off groomers better.

We went right to the backside and hit up Gemini and then Borealis. Parts of Gemini had some fun snow for cruising around in, enough where it felt like we were floating and parts of Borealis did too. I’ve mentioned this before, but that loud humming from the enormous power lines on Gemini is so weird. The last section of Borealis was pretty sketch. There were waist high, snowmounds/moguls that were spaced pretty far apart with some good snow in between so I got to work on my turning.

One thing I am realizing that I do is charge and I like to be pretty aggressive with my riding. This has been screwing me over. In runs like Borealis, where some parts of the snow are hard and cut up and others are soft, and the whole area has randomly-placed large mounds of snow that are hard, I have such a hard time getting down. This is probably pretty obvious, but I found that instead of forcing the turns when I want to turn, I have to wait for the right time–like a large mound or bank to use to turn–and watch the natural formations in the snow for opportune times rather than just turning whenever I want (like what I can do on groomers). After William suggested I try this, it made the whole run so much easier. It was a bit scarier, since I felt a little more out of control (since I couldn’t do whatever I wanted), but it made it so much easier and smoother. Instead of fighting my way down, I just followed the natural flow of it.

After a few runs, we decided that instead of heading to the edges of the ski area boundary, we would go straight down the center–down between Waybacks and Corona Bowl.

I hadn’t been down in the trees since my embarrassing roll down the entire hill under the chairlift, so I was a bit apprehensive. Plus I am crazy-paranoid about tree wells, which is probably a good thing. We stuck together all of the way down, just in case something did happen and had a lot of fun! Some parts were pretty tracked out (you can see it in the picture), but others were so soft and powdery. There were a lot of tracks running through the trees so it was reassuring to know we weren’t going to end up looking off a small boulder drop or down into a creek. (There was hole in the snow in the trees and if you looked all of the way to the bottom you could see a creek, but this was marked-thanks Stevens!)

The first time down, I took what I had picked up over on Borealis about going with the flow and using banks and mounds to turn, and used it in the trees. This made a huge difference. Everything was so easy! The second time down, it all went out the window and I was fighting the snow again. I don’t know what was going on, maybe my legs were done, but it just wasn’t happening.

In all of the snow, I ended up losing my terrain park pass, so I headed down to the lodge to get a new one before it got too late. As we were pulling out of the parking lot on our way home it started snowing again-hopefully it keeps coming. I still need more deep snow practice!