our shop has been flooded with head ski boots. While we are kind of in our getting-ready-to-move phase we found room to (somehow) recieve pallets upon pallets of Head ski boots, snowboard boots, snowboards and helmets. Now, mostly these are ski boots, all Edge and Dream Thang boots. Everyone’s feet love these boots and what is the point in getting boots that people’s feet don’t like? The Head snowboard boots that we got are way awesome, too. I’m guess mostly stoked on these boots because the rate that they get returned will be verrrrrrrry low.

on a personal note, I lost my car keys and had to borrow a friends truck to get to work today. if you see my keys, call the shop.

Driving up to Powder Mountain, I thought it was strange that snow was falling. I brushed it off as just a random flurry or lake effect snow somehow reaching up to Huntsville. It wasn’t sticking to the road and it was pretty light, so I wasn’t getting my hopes up. As we drove on, the snow started to come down heavier and was sticking to the access road to the condo we had reserved. “Big deal,” I thought. An inch or two might actually worsen the skiing conditions, so I wasn’t too excited yet. As the night wore on, I realized this wasn’t going to be a spring, junk snow day. We woke up to 10″ of powder that had covered all the ice crust and crud below. Now I was excited.
Rich and I got a late start and expected to see hundreds of people ripping up the fresh snow before we could get to it. Well, we showed up to Paradise lift at 9:30 and started to notice that we were the only ones around, besides the lift operators. Oh, yeah, and the sun was out. We decided to take our first run down the nose and it was, well… untracked. On the next lift ride up, we saw another skier make some turns near ours, so we decided it was getting a little too tracked up for us. We dropped in to the skiers left at the first lift pole and got a hundred foot wide section to ourselves which was… untracked. We made our mark and went on. The rest of the day followed the same pattern, making a track each and moving on to the next area of untracked snow. It was beautiful.

By the end of the day the clouds started to move in and it started to snow again. The wind picked up and it blew and stormed all night. The snow report claimed only 3″, but with the wind, all of our tracks filled in. The mountain was untracked again! But it was pretty crowded on friday. There was at least one skier or snowboarder every 15 chairs, so I was a little disappointed. My secret stashes and favorite lines were untouched, so I had a blast skiing for a couple hours while Rich was babysitting.
So every time someone raves about heli skiing, I will just remember skiing at Powder Mountain and think, “I can get a season pass for the same price of one day of heli skiing!” I’ll take Powder Mountain, thank you.

Now I am down in Salt Lake where the temperature is 60 degrees and everyone is riding bikes and walking their dogs. It is hard to believe I had one of the best powder days of the season just hours ago.

Jon and I took a day off on Thursday to discuss future business plans at our home away from home in Powder Mountain. Of course while there we figured to get in a day of cruising amongst the discussions.

However, 8-10 inches of fresh powder at Powder Mountain in April means only one thing… untracked powder runs from opening to close. There were perhaps 200 people at the entire resort and probably 180 of them were staying on the 5 groomed runs open that day. That left 5000 acres of untouched terrain and try as we might we couldn’t track it all up.

Hopefully our business plans didn’t get set back a year due to our selfish behavior.