Ski Days 7, 8, and 9: On Patrol @ The Bowl

This one's going to be a little light on the details, since Day 7 was 11 days ago, and day 8 was 4 days ago. Day 9 was just the day before yesterday, though. Hey, I'm on vacation, what do you want from me? :)

Dec 20th was ski day #7 for me this season, and it was one of those days that used to typify patrol days for me - not terribly cold, but very wet. Definitely a pack-cover day. I don't remember exactly how the day started, but it did rain. Not as bad as I had come to expect from looking at the forecast, but it did rain. It being a Sunday before a major holiday, we had very few guests at Ski Bowl. I was counting people out of curiosity while on my assignment at Multorpor, and the patrollers did not actually outnumber the guests, although it may have seemed so.

I'd waxed and sharpened both my old K2 Escape 5500 Unlimited and Apache Outlaw skis - the 5500s just in case the coverage was thin. I decided to actually take the 5500s on the hill with me, and it seems I didn't need to do that. In fact, there were a couple runs on the upper bowl where I wished I had the fatter Apaches, especially since I got asked to tail-rope for one of the patrollers doing his annual 'check-ride'. I got a little caught up in the chunk and the ski dived a little on me. I went down, but as gracefully as one can when one's feet don't go where one expects. No re-injury to the knee.

Very little happened from a ski patrol standpoint, as far as I can recall. I ended up doing more skiing than anything else, and spent a good bit of time at Rescue Center at the top of the bowl. The groomers over on Multorpor were excellent, very skiable.

Day 8 - the 27th - was cold and overcast. That's really all I remember. I spent a bunch of time at RC again, checking the score of the Steelers game (23-20, good guys). I shot just one picture from the RC window, from my iPhone.


That was about the best visibility we had that day. The snow wasn't great, a lot of hard stuff out there mixed with some dusting, but the groomed stuff that wasn't scraped off was nice. With freshly sharpened and waxed skis, it was easy going for me. I think the sun tried to show itself a few times, and there were a couple holes in the clouds where I saw blue sky, but it never got sunny by any stretch. It was a nice day, though - no pack cover needed.

We had a pretty big crew on Sunday, so things got done quickly. This also usually means that when the injuries are few, it almost seems like nothing happened because there were so many of us. The story would be rather different on Tuesday.

Day 9 - the 29th - was a bit goofy. No Hill Captain was dispatched, and it was looking like we'd have only myself and one other hill patroller, plus one associate that I'd never met before. Without a Hill Captain, we effectively had no one whose official capacity was to do the paperwork, hand out radios, and interface with the paid patrol at the area. So, being the most senior of the hill patrollers that day, I took it upon myself to play Hill Captain.

Thankfully, we had a walk-on hill patroller, so there were 3 of us plus (Andrew, Jared, and I) the associate ("Raz", a pretty cool guy). There were 3 paid patrollers on duty as well, and they basically covered all the hill setup stuff, which was cool. I did find a couple things that needed doing on the hill, so I took care of those, but it was one of those mornings where it seemed like we might not have many guests and little to do.

That turned out not to be the case. It was sunny to start the day, which was a nice change from most of my patrol days. Definitely no need for the pack cover today, and it was worthy of actually hauling out the "real" camera and taking pictures outside.



But the time to just hang out up top and enjoy the view was short-lived. We got a call for a case - my first real patrolling action of the season! It was reported as a back injury, and responding from RC all the way over to the terrain park on Multorpor gave me a ton of time to imagine what I might have to deal with. Jared followed me out the door to wait at the top of Multorpor to bring the sled.

Turned out to be kind of an odd one. Obviously, I can't go into great detail, but we did backboard him - mostly just for ease-of-transport. I couldn't detect any fracture or anything that indicated a spinal injury. We got him into the aid room, did some more assessment, but found nothing that indicated anything other than perhaps a muscular injury. I ended up spending the bulk of the middle of the day in the aid room, keeping an eye on the injured guy until his dad was able to take him home, and then dealing with a walk-in case.

Meanwhile, people are out on the hill losing their children and dropping backpacks off the chairlift. Poor Jared got tagged to go grab a backpack that had been dropped off the lift near the rather treacherous (since the snow level is so low) cliff band underneath the lower bowl chair. Sounded like quite an adventure. We had a couple calls that came in from Lift Operations about injured people, but we could not locate them. Between that and the missing child reports, we were running pretty ragged trying to find people. Definitely a busy day.

Towards the latter part of the afternoon, though, things calmed down and it started to snow. A LOT. I pulled out the pack cover just for the trip down the mountain to the "palace" to de-boot and head home. Got all the radios signed back in and on their chargers, paperwork faxed off, keys put away, and headed off to a cabin in Govy where Andrew and his folks and some of their friends were staying for a quick beer and "de-brief", then headed home in the snow. Nice day.

Ski Day 6: An Epic Couple Hours @ Meadows

My original plan for today was to ski all day at either Meadows or Ski Bowl. I'd have been flying solo, and while I don't mind doing it, I prefer to ski with people. So it was probably just as well that I stayed up way too late Tuesday night playing TF2 and woke up all kinds of late today, or I might not have had the chance to get some epic runs in with ski patrol pal and all-around-good-guy Barkernews. He'd basically been chomping at the bit to go ski, and wasn't going to be denied the freshies that we knew were up there. Sure glad NoPoGirl gave him the 'hall pass'.

So it was that sometime shortly after 5:30, we were on our way up to Meadows to go rip it up. I hadn't done any proper powder skiing since last season, so I was curious to see how that would go. I've been skiing with a lot more confidence the last few times out, so I figured the knee would handle it fine. I've had a little bit of patellar pain of late, so have been taking it a bit easy, but I felt pretty good today.

The drive up was pretty brutal with the snow and wind, but it didn't take us long to find a sweet powder stash that made it worth the trip. That we made 4 runs on it was so much the better. I was skiing pretty well, and rather comfortably until about the 5th run. I was getting pretty tired, but I knew I had a couple more in me, and we skied pretty much right up until closing time. It was only a couple hours, but we made them count. I might have gone a little too hard at the beginning, but I was having too much damn fun.

The Apache Outlaws once again proved to be a more than capable ski for everything - we found some fresh stuff that nobody had touched (oh MAN was it great), there was some tracked-up stuff, some groomed, and some kind of mushy corny stuff near the bottom. The skis just handle it all.

We packed it in probably just as they were letting the last people on the chair for the night, and I think we made the right choice instead of trying to squeeze in another run. Down the hill we went, stopping in Govy for a beer and a bite to eat. We definitely earned it. That was the most fun I've had skiing in a while.

Ski Days 4 & 5: Calibrating @ Meadows and Evaluating @ Bowl

This weekend was shaping up - in my mind, at least - to be a pretty easy weekend of skiing. The coaches' calibration/clinic for the ski patrol was Saturday, and today was patrol tryouts. I figured Saturday to be a day where I'd just ski a little bit, demonstrate a skill or two here or there, and that was it. Sunday, I figured it would be similar - ski a little bit, watch the potential future patrollers show us what they could do, write stuff on a card, call it a day.

While Saturday was basically a 11am-2:30pm ski day, I put in a good bit of turns at Meadows. We spent a good bit of time working on getting everyone on the same page as far as teaching and demonstrating the fundamentals, as well as the drills to help our apprentices sharpen their skiing skills and turn them into sled-drivers. I was really showing off, too. I'd done a pretty good job on sharpening up the edges of my skis, so they were gripping nicely on the firm stuff where most of the others weren't, which allowed me to really let 'em rip a little bit.

One of the other coaches who hadn't really seen me ski a lot said that he didn't realize I was such a good skier, and asked if I had a racing background. Not only did it feel good to get that compliment, but I really felt fantastic on the hill. Everything just felt smooth and crisp, but also like it was a lot of work. The large radius turns on the hard groomed stuff on Shooting Star Ridge were so much fun, just rolling the skis over and making big, fast, powerful arcs. Still some strengthening to do if I want to be able to go that hard all day. And I do.

Today was another relatively short day, skiing from just before 10 to 2:30-ish, and evaluating people who want to join the patrol as sled-drivers. I wondered if we'd have any 'rock stars' in our group, but secretly hoped none of them ski better than I do (they don't, not the ones in either of the two groups I evaluated with JG).

Without giving too much away (or boring you with the details), we ran them through some 'static drills', then started evaluating them skiing the groomed stuff - carved turns, skidded turns, sideslipping, etc. Part of what we were looking for was how they'd handle skiing the off-groom stuff as well. There wasn't a lot of it on the part of the mountain that was open - high winds limited us to the east side of Ski Bowl, as did time - but the stuff we did find was challenging enough to help us separate the wheat from the chaff.

One of these sections of chunk-n-junk was over on the upper east section of Raceway. That part of the run looked at first glance like a spot where we'd get to see the candidates ski some powder, or at least some loose ungroomed snow. The stuff underneath the few inches of windblown powder was rather firm and very uneven. I volunteered to demonstrate, and skied it very well. So well, in fact, that the guys we were evaluating underestimated just how challenging it was. The first guy crashed about 5 turns in, and one of the others came out of a ski about 2/3 of the way down. I merely grinned, especially when satisfied they weren't hurt, but was positively cackling inside when they all were flipping me crap about making it look so easy. Even JG was impressed.

Shame that after we'd released our group, I went and chattered out of a ski on the lower section of Raceway - in full view of a whole bunch of people looking out the window of the Multorpor Lodge. I didn't go down hard at all, didn't get hurt, but it was pretty embarrassing. I laughed it off, though, since you can't really do much once the binding releases.

JG and I evaluated a second group, running them through all the same kind of stuff, and I had another really good run through the crap on upper Raceway. JG told on me, though, telling the second group not to assume it was going to be as easy as I was going to make it look.

After all the ski testing was done, it was back to the patrol building to de-brief and finally eat my sandwich. Satisfied with myself for having skied as well as I did, and not really feeling too beat up after back-to-back days, I headed home. I'm gonna go ice my knee now.