Tuesday, August 26, 2008

A weekend at the (somewhat) Snowy Mountains

So, I caved and went to the snow again. I couldn't help it.

It was a weekend trip down to the NSW slopes with Phil and her friend, and Dave B and it was quite possibly the best time I've had in the snow in Australia. Sure, the snow wasn't as good compared to a couple of powder days in the past, but it just happened to be the first time I had spent in the snow when I could actually do blacks and off-piste with a moderate amount of competency. This meant that the whole mountain is opened up instead of just a select few runs. In fact, I think I rode mostly runs that I hadn't been to before, which was a definite plus.

It began late on Friday night when Phil picked me up and we embarked on a long journey (picking up more people on the way) to Berridale. The trip was (thankfully) incident-free, and we ended up getting to the room at around 1:30 in the morning. Sadly, the remote was missing from the room and so we couldn't get the snowboard DVDs that Dave had recently bought to play on the DVD player. We ended up watching a bit of the Olympics then sleeping.

We got to Thredbo a bit late the next day because we stopped at Jindabyne for breakfast and ended up being stuck in slow traffic going past a mobile RBT. The snow seemed very good at the start of the day (due to some overnight falls) but I didn't get a chance to ride anything new until after lunch since Dave's bindings broke and he had to buy some new ones. After lunch, we all went over to the top of Karel's and headed towards the Golf Course Bowl, where much fun was had. It was the first time I rode pretty comfortably along trees, possibly because it was pretty flat (but still lots of fun). What was not fun was the traverse out, complete with stumps sticking out from the ground. We went through some more trees at the end of the day before meeting up with Dave (who we lost during one of the runs) and heading back to the apartment.

The most notable thing about that night was that we had Bits & Pizzas. I love that place.

The second day we spent at Perisher Blue where the snow was significantly less nice than the previous day. The weather was really warm, so I rode without a jacket all day and ended up getting minor sunburn on my neck. It was, however, a very enjoyable day. The first thing we figured out was that anything off-piste was not worth doing in the morning, so we did some groomers and had lunch while waiting for the snow to melt a bit. We then proceeded to have an awesome time (or a bad one if you went with Phil) at the double-black area of the mountain called Double Trouble. It wasn't as menacing as it sounded, and was really only a hard blue or a black. It was probably made a double black due to the amount of trees that was in there, but I didn't have any trouble navigating my way through the area (I can't say the same for my friends). We followed that up with some more off-piste in Guthega, where we accidentally ended up out of bounds and headed towards the road. We had to walk back to Guthega at the end of it, but a good time was had by all (even David, who ended up further down the road than any of us). Sadly, the long way back to Smiggins (where we parked) meant that we didn't have time to do much else at the end of the day.

The drive back to Sydney was eventful, and involved stops at KFC and McDonald's, as well as some interesting overtaking, and a kangaroo in the middle of the road. I somehow managed to lose my phone (left it with Dave) AND my bag (left it with Phil) in the process, which was quite impressive, even by my standards.

Next snow trip: Japan (I hope)