Fixed Skiing Costs

We are season pass holders at the Summit at Snoqualmie and so we have to ski as much as possible not because we enjoy it, oh no, but in order to lower the per ski cost. We don't love skiing nearly as much as we love accounting.

Skiing Some More

I've been gaining a bit of skill and confidence with all of my ski practice.

I gained so much skill in fact that Lydia insisted we try a different slope. We've just been going up the same one over and over thus far, which was good training. She found another green one for us to try that hypothetically should have been the same skill level as the one I'm used to. Well "somehow" we ended up on a blue slope, which was pretty much impossible for my ability. I fell enough times that I ended up taking my skis off and walking the rest of the way down. I hurt my neck pretty bad but despite Lydia's efforts I did not die. For the next couple weeks I was walking around with my head leaning on one shoulder because it hurt to hold my head up straight. It also hurt to drive when I had to turn my head to look at mirrors and traffic and such. I will never forget this betrayal.

Apparently the trick to getting better at skiing is to do it incessantly even when you do not wish to do so.

Lydia has a cool ski jacket but amusingly like 20 people on the slopes today had the same or similar.

Skiing for a Crowd

We scaled the Cascade Mountains on a sunny Sunday to utilize our season ski pass at the Summit at Snoqualmie.

We learned a hard lesson about coming to this place on weekends, as opposed to nights after work. The line for the ski lift was crazy long.

I'm making slow progress. One thing that is kind of a bummer is that you need to constantly turn in order to slow yourself down. Fine. But if you suck at turning and do it too slowly, you'll end up going too fast to turn at all and lose control. Quite a predicament.

The sight of 4 year old girls flying past me is especially emasculating. They don't weigh anything so it probably doesn't even hurt when they fall. Screw them and screw gravity.

As a reward to myself for surviving yet another mountainy murder attempt from Lydia, I tasted of some the beers I brought home from our visit to Tacoma's Sig Brewing Co.

Seattle Skiing

I must have lost a bet or something because I let Lydia rope me into buying a season pass to the Summit at Snoqualmie, a ski resort on Snoqualmie Pass in the Cascade Mountains. It's kind of wild that skiing used to require a big expensive trip to a place like Park City and now we can just pop over and ski after work on a weekday.

The place is really well lit so it's a great place to ski at night. It gets dark here pretty early in the winter so it works out well.

It's a pretty nice place.

I seem to have forgotten what little I ever knew about skiing. Luckily I've signed up for an entire season of falling on my butt repeatedly so that I can remember.

Today we attempted to drive to the Summit at Snoqualmie in order to go skiing. The weather was pretty bad in the mountains but I just went slower and slower but figured I would get to the top eventually. Well eventually we got to an area where there were signs that said we could go no further unless we had snow chains or 4 wheel drive. That would have been nice information to have at the bottom of the mountain! We quit and drove back down. Sad.

If I Die in Utah, Bury Me Face Down

Now that I'd had about five hours of total ski training, Lydia thought it would be a good idea to send me hurtling down the side of a mountain.

They had some charming names for the slopes. "You gonna die","zero liability", etc..

When I read that Utah's Wasatch Brewery offered a Polygamy Porter I immediately added it to my must-try Utah food list. Why have just one?

The others have skied before so we had split up, which was lucky for me because they weren't around to hear my screams. We met back up for lunch at a yurt. It was sad for us because after our recent China debacle we had to cancel a trip we'd booked to Mongolia that also stopped in Beijing. As a recap: I saw really cheap like $300 flights round trip to Beijing, booked two of them, bought a 10-year Chinese visa, barely made it out of China alive once, canceled the other trip, the end.

We were going to stay in a yurt and hang out with a Mongolian family! Sad.

We picked what were supposed to be easy slopes but they were not. I just braked the whole way down and was still going too fast. There were ledges that I could have flown over the side of on some turns that made things even more unpleasant. One time in particular I remember going so fast that I could hear the wind... like if you stuck your head out of a car window while it was moving. If I ever do this again it's going to need to be somewhere a whole lot easier. At one point I got so frustrated I took off my skiis and just walked the rest of the way down.

My legs were getting sore from clenching for days at a time by this point so we turned in our gear early and went back to the cabin. On the plus side that meant I could keep myself awake for some hot tub time! There were signs about "no alcohol" and even a woman watching the front desk... so we just rolled up our beers in our towels. Nice try, Utah!

We saw some remainders of the 2002 Winter Olympics that were held here. 

So in summary skiing is really expensive, kind of painful, and dangerous. Really a whole lot like Scuba diving when I think about it. Maybe a one for one arrangement can be Lydia's punishment for any further ski trips?