I wake up on the early side today, but stay in bed reading some of my Kindle book, which is the 2nd Bobiverse, For We Are Many. I get out of bed before 7:00 am, then read more of my physical book, Vietnam: A View From the Front Lines. I usually have 2 books with me, a physical book and an e-book. I do that, drink coffee, and make my standard oatmeal with bananas and peanut butter.
I also take some time checking the Pico map to see what we missed the day before. After looking at it, we really didn’t miss much. We find a few trails, but for the most part yesterday was a fairly comprehensive set of runs. We decide that our general plan today is to start at the top of the hill while the snow is fresh, in theory. We also decide that we’ll call it a day at 1:00, since it’ll take us about 6 hours from the last run until we walk into the house.
As discussed before, we decide to take the medium lift up then scoot down to the big lift. There’s no lift from the bottom to the top, so you need to up-down-up your way to Pico Peak. We do a few runs on the big hill, and I’m not feeling “on” today. This is only the second time I’ve ever done back-to-back days on skis, and while I felt pretty good this morning, I’m making all sorts of mistakes early on.
After a few runs we head all the way to the bottom to check out the left side hill we missed the day before. The interesting trail on the map is closed for ski team practice, so we take the easy run to the big lift again, and go all the way up to the top. This time we go down and my day starts to deteriorate, rapidly going to shit. At this point, Utah is telling me at every pause on the hill what I should try do better. At this stage of the game, while I know he means well, it’s just dumping more kindling on the raging fire of meltdown.
What I generally find when trying to teach something is that it works best to pick just one thing and focus on that. If it doesn’t stick after 3 times, just drop it and enjoy the day. Today I was teflon, and every piece of instruction was sliding off me. It was all I could do to not be on the back of my skis most of this morning, which we all know is a recipe for gravity checking. The ski poles were as useful to me as putting a watermelon in my pants today.
It is at this point that D realizes I’m on the verge of quitting for the day, so she suggests I hit the smaller hill and do some medium runs, which is a great idea. We do this a few times, and it puts me in a much better groove. Our time is starting to run out, so we decide to go all the way to the top. It will be one last time for a final run from top to bottom and that will be that.
We decide to hit the one trail, Forty Niner, that’s been my nemesis for the past 2 days. The trail is comprised of blobs of snow which have been made over the past 2 days, and haven’t been groomed the whole time. There are lots of randomly spaced, uneven bumps on a pretty decent (for me) slope. For the most part, this is a bit of a war zone of humanity the whole weekend. Each time we come up on one of these 2 areas, it’s sort of like this, just without the American flags:
The basic problem here is that from the peak down, there’s only 1 blue trail, and this is it. In my limited experience, this is a very advanced blue, so people go up thinking they’ll be able to cobble themselves down this. Compared to the rest of the park, this is a considerably harder blue trail, and the carnage on the trail this weekend shows as much.
As such, every time we hit this run, I would pick my way through a mass of people that probably had no business being up here. In reality, I’m happy I could weave through the people and make my way down without running into anyone nor laying down. But I wasn’t feeling super confident about it the whole weekend.
Our last run on these 2 sections was just before 1:00, and most people were at lunch at this time of day. So both areas were mostly clean of emotionally shattered humanity. This, coupled with the proper warm-up on the previous 3 runs, meant this was my best run on this segment on the weekend. We skied this, then went all the way to the bottom to close out the day. It was a good way to end the day & the ski weekend.
Strava link can be found here. Today we were moving for 3:03, skied 26.5 miles, and got 14,066 feet of machine-enabled elevation.
Today we did 11 runs in all, listed here for the history books:
1. Fool’s Gold (to the big lift)
2. Forty Niner/Sunset Schuss/Bushwacker
3. Upper Ka/Middle Pike
4. Forty Niner/Middle Pike
5. Forty Niner/Easy Street/Middle Pike/Lower Pike
6. Bushwacker/C Slope
7. Forty Niner/Easy Street/Lower Giant Killer
8. Prospector/Expressway/Swinger
9. Expressway/Panhandler/Swinger/
10. Expressway/Swinger
11. Fool’s Gold (to the big lift)
12. Forty Niner/Middle Pike/Lower Pike
After the last run of the day we walked right to the car, got dressed, and hit the road to pick up Allison who stayed in town to relax. We stopped at a Dunkin Donuts to grab some teas for the road and I saw a chocolate glazed donut that looked too good to pass up. I went for it. I took 2 bites then shared it with D & Utah. No surprise, it wasn’t nearly as good as it looked.
Went back into town, picked up Allison, then jumped on route 7 south, made our way to Troy then Albany, then 87 south to Rockaway to drop them off, and finally home about 45 minutes later. We got home around 6:45, so my prediction of 6 hours from the last run was pretty close to being on the money.
Then we were home. This was the first full-on ski weekend getaway where the whole intention was to ski. Day 2 was tough but I will say I enjoyed both days, and Pico Mountain was a great place for me this weekend. I think I may be ready for some bigger challenges on skis now, whatever that means. We were hesitant to spend the money on Killington but we may have to check it out next year. Or…maybe later this year?
At home, we finished off the weekend by watching Ali Wong: Baby Cobra. Once again, this woman is absolutely hilarious. Her other one is better but this one is really solid as well.
Traveling Normandy 