Shaking the Snowglobe

Alex, Zach, and Hayley left our Tahoe house yesterday. Eating dinner by myself and falling asleep to an empty house gave me a sense that my trip was truly beginning. I woke up feeling the past four days of skiing deep in my legs. A calm morning of oatmeal, reading the Eastern Sierra backcountry skiing guidebook that Nick left behind, and relaxing seemed in order……but then it started snowing outside :). I anxiously waited for my thermal gear to dry and was in the car heading to Palisades by 10:15am, intent on parking near the Far East chairlift to hang out solo on Resort Chair the whole day.

A quick aside though to tell and show a story from yesterday at Granite Chief. People had been talking about how this past Tuesday would be amazing skiing since I arrived in Tahoe late last week. The two weekend storms combined with the expected high wind closures on Monday would make for an epic powder day in the upper mountain on Tuesday. That is exactly what happened…I practically raced another solo skier from the base of the mountain, up WaSheShu, across to Siberia, over to Gold Coast, down Shirley, and up to the Granite Chief lift – the edge of the resort where the powder piles up into magical glades, steep chutes, and by the end of the day a magical hike up to Granite Chief Peak. Since the singles line was taking forever (the chair only has three seats so its rare to find an available group to join), I started just jamming into the group section and asking twosomes if I could hop in as the third. The fact that it was Tuesday morning and I was having to line optimize speaks to the stoke everyone was feeling about this snow! I wound up with two funny guys, Christian and Paul, who work at a Berkeley ski shop and get Tuesday/Wednesdays off to come up and test out the merchandise. We were debating the best lines to come down – while everything was amazing, there is some urgency to grab the fresh snow before it’s skied out – and landed on a tough to access chute that Christian knew a safe line to get to. We came down the line and had an absolute blast, and ended up running into some of my friends back at the chair who we invited to come do the same line on the next run. Well…this time things got a little more hairy as my new friend Paul took a tumble and his ski popped off landing just at the edge of a….pretty tall cliff. The ski was completely inaccessible and he glissaded (butt slid) down the rest of the run, but it made for a great story on the rest of the lift rides up as the bright green ski stood out in plain view.

Paul hung out eaten his pocket PB&J laughing with the lifties while a couple of very jazzed patrol people grabbed climbing ropes and strapped on harnesses to retrieve the ski. Soon after, as visibility cleared up, Granite Chief Peak opened up. This is probably my favorite area of the mountain, but I have never been around when conditions allowed for this gate to lift. I hiked up to the ridge for the first time and skied down a glorious chute, capping an awesome day.

Ok, back to today. I spent the morning traipsing around Resort Chair enjoying the snow and briefly breaking through sun. That lift is on the other side of the resort from Granite Chief, and is immensely slow. Perfect for long, tiring, bumpy runs and then a relaxing and beautiful ride back up the slope. I had some company on one lift – one of those older skier guys who have apparently lived in every Western state, skied every backcountry route in Alaska, and slept in every alpine hut in Switzerland. I didn’t get much in in that conversation but it was fun to listen for a while.

I headed over to Red Dog Ridge, dare I say my favorite section of the entire mountain, where either a long traverse from the KT-22 lift or a brief but tiring hike from the Red Dog lift filter out the crowds. That combined with the winds depositing snow all day into this section of the mountain make for consistently deep and smooth turns through glades that spit you out into a cat track where it seems like passersby look at you wondering just how you got there. After a couple more laps I went into the KT-22 lift and wound up sharing the chair with a girl who I’d spend the rest of the day with. She was on her fifth day of skiing after 13 years of snowboarding, coming up for a day trip on a day off from Veterinary school. She crushed it for her fifth day on skis, coming down Red Dog ridge with only one major tumble – we ended the day with some beers inside at the Chamois and a plan to keep hanging out until she had to head back to Walnut Creek in a couple of hours. Not going to lie – meeting a cool, cute girl on the mountain during an epic powdery day of solo skiing is possibly the best way to kick off a month of ski bumming I could imagine.

Now I am going to make some black bean soup, quesadillas, and probably 3 of Josie’s homemade cookies that are sitting in the freezer. All while I watch Gattaca. Life is good.

I decided I’ll tack on a song of the day…today’s and the last few day’s has been Hypnotize by the White Stripes. I’ve found when I drive a car by myself I tend to play sounds like this extremely loudly with a massive smile on my face head bobbing along.