Ski Days 21 & 22: Evaluated and Evaluating @ MHM

This past weekend was another one of those skiing weekends where I skied both days and the experience on each day was completely different. I kind of like those - because different is interesting and interesting is good - but when you start out with the sunny bluebird day, you don't want the second day to be different...

Anyway, Saturday was nothing short of awesome. I wasn't dispatched to patrol, but I had received a phone call last Sunday from our training director to talk about how my team was looking and who was ready to test. He mentioned that there was some desire that I take the NSP Senior Ski & Toboggan (S&T) test at Mt. Bachelor on April 11th, and that there was a clinic I needed to attend first, on March 27th.

I hadn't planned on doing the NSP Senior stuff until next season, but I thought, 'why not?'. If the patrol needs another Instructor Trainer, and I get to ski at Mt. Bachelor, then cool. If I don't manage to pass, at least I got to ski at Bachelor, and I'll hopefully know what I need to work on.

So, I went to the clinic. I couldn't have picked a better day to go skiing, and we basically took all our warm-up runs off the Cascade chair, which gave us access to some really fabulous wind-blown powder as well as some of the most perfect groomed corduroy you'll ever ski. Once we were finished having fun, it was down to business. We had a guy with us who has been patrolling forever (Dave, he's 78!), who has been an evaluator on a lot of NSP Senior S&T tests and knows what they're looking for.

The first thing he wanted to see us do was carved turns - large, meduim, and short radius. Now, when I carve large and medium radius turns, I get fast. This, in my opinion, is the natural effect of carving good turns. Unfortunately, despite my nicely-carved turns, I was told I needed to slow down for the evaluators. Even if I'm in control, they aren't going to like it if I go "too fast". So, I worked on that. Dave did say my short-radius turns were "absolutely perfect", though, so I was feeling pretty damn good about that.

But I had better be good at this stuff by now. I've been skiing a long time. And I've had some great coaches.

After all my showing off, it was time to see if I was any good at running the four-handled toboggan ("Cascade 350"), and find out if my tail-roping is as good as I thought it was. I had only run an empty 350 twice before Saturday. Sounds like I did pretty well - the trainers said I didn't look like a guy who had only run an empty 350 only twice in my life. I actually like running the 350 in the rear operator position. The 2-handled toboggan we used was a brand-spanking new Clipper, which is my favorite sled to run. It just handles so well.

The snow was pretty much perfect all day, even when it started to get a little mushy when things warmed up in the afternoon. Just fantastic. And I was feeling really good about my chances for passing the Senior S&T test on April 11th.

Sunday, the weather was entirely different. It was another blizzard, basically. Okay, maybe not a blizzard, but it was definitely snowing pretty hard and fairly windy. The snow was kind of heavy, and the sun-facing slopes were pretty chunky and a little firm underneath the newer snow. This made sled-testing a little challenging for the apprentices, and it got tougher as the day wore on and the snow got heavier and wetter. Still, we passed 8 of the 10 that came up that day. One of my guys didn't pass, and I think he just had a bad day, because I'd seen much better from him the last day we trained. Two of my guys who passed were guys I wouldn't have sent up for testing after what I saw last week, but I guess things clicked for them.

We de-briefed at Charlie's in Govy afterward, and passing 8 guys worked out perfectly, since the shot-ski has 4 shot glasses on it. :)

My knee held up fine over the weekend, but I was definitely sore after back-to-back days. The swelling wasn't bad, and I wasn't as stiff as I expected on Monday. Hopefully, the knee continues to be less and less painful after ski days, and next season will be better.

Ski Day 20: Training in a Blizzard @ MHM

Yeah, it snowed at Meadows today. Quite a bit. And it was windy. Quite a bit windy. I had figured on having to go it alone coaching the apprentices today, but was pleasantly surprised to find a coach who happened to be patrolling up there willing to help me out. That was cool.

It was Andrew, who not only coached me when I was apprentice, but also hauled my sorry ass off the hill when I tore my ACL last March.

Other than fairly high winds and a lot of blowing snow, there isn't much to say about today. The guys all made good progress, and I have one guy that I'm sure is ready to test next week. Two others could probably pass, and the remaining guys still need some work.

The snow was awesome. We had to take a break from dragging sleds around to take a couple free runs on Rock Garden. Really really great - and untouched - snow. We'd have probably ventured into Heather Canyon if it wasn't such a time-consuming trip.

Weird thing of the day: my knee was painful the first time I sat in the back of one of the toboggans today. I was worried for a few minutes that I'd managed to re-injure it somehow, but once I got out of the sled at the bottom, it was fine. Felt fine the rest of the day. Weird.

Ski Day 19: A Practical Demo For My Trainees @ Timberline

Hey, look - I didn't wait almost a week (or longer) to get around to blogging about a patrol day. I'm proud of myself, but not to the point that I'll be testing my flexibility by patting myself on the back.

Or did I just do that?

Whatever. Anyway, Sunday was another day of apprentice coaching for me, and this time I didn't have to fly solo. I don't mind doing so, other than I prefer not to have to be the one jabbering on all the time. We didn't have our full complement of trainees, so Brett and I had to take turns being a passenger in one of the toboggans.

We got kind of a late start to dragging the sleds around, because we both misread a message about where the toboggans would be. Turns out that not only were they not where we thought they'd be, they weren't where they were supposed to be. Confused yet? Good. Or, dammit. Despite being at Timberflats, we did manage to find some decent steeps to train on, and the snow was nice. It was sunny, cold, and breezy, but it did warm up a bit throughout the day. We pretty much did our laps in the lower part of the area through the morning.

In the afternoon, we went back to work on the lower area, then decided we should go check things out up top, so off we went to Palmer. We weren't even really off the chairlift before a call came in, and due to the lack of patrollers up there (why? where was everyone?), we got to respond. I was first on scene since I volunteered to be the first responder, and it was pretty obvious to me what I was dealing with before I even took the guy's jacket off to see his shoulder - dislocated. My own right shoulder twinged a little when he showed me that he couldn't lift it, and my suspicions were confirmed upon checking it out.

I made the appropriate calls, and got him into a blanket roll to stabilize the shoulder, with some assistance from Brett and the apprentices. Loaded him into the sled and off we went.

I'd forgotten just how long a toboggan pull I had ahead of me, when I said "I'll drive." We were a couple towers up from the bottom of Palmer. Anyone who knows Timberline knows that while not steep up there, it's a pretty long haul. I wondered to myself briefly how the knee would hold up - I hadn't had the opportunity to test it like this. Sure, I've skied 18 days to this point, and a couple of those days were above average intensity, but I hadn't skied a run that long all in one shot, much less having to do so braking a rescue toboggan behind me. With an apprentice watching.

I needn't have worried.

Yeah, of course I was sore at the end of the day, and there wasn't any time to dwell on the run when I got the guy down to the first aid room. I didn't really think about it again until after they got him on the ambulance gurney. Pretty proud I did it, and silently thanked my Ortho Doc and my PT.

Oh, one thing that was really cool was that the ambulance guys complimented me on my blanket roll. They almost didn't want to cut the cravats to remove it so they could use their contraption. Good thing they did, though - we got our blanket back. Those things disappear quite a bit, apparently.

Anyway, we put the sled back out on the hill, helped a girl find her dad and brother, then helped with sweep. Ended the day back at the Govy building, signing training cards and grading map tests, drinking a cold Pipeline Porter.

Ski Day 18: Almost The ACL Anniversary @ Ski Bowl

Sunday found me in a familiar place, not surprisingly - Mt. Hood Ski Bowl. Other than having to 'fly solo' as a toboggan coach for the patrol, there was really only one thing noteworthy about Sunday.

It had been just one day shy of a year since I blew out my left knee up there at that very ski area.

It wasn't like it was the first time I'd been back there, and aside from it being a beautiful morning despite a severe lack of snow in the lower parts of the area, I was too focused on the task at hand - training apprentices - to give much thought to what had transpired 364 days prior. But after a few runs, my gaze as I rode the upper bowl chair drifted to my left, in the direction of the traverse where I crashed.

That section of the upper bowl hasn't been desirable skiing most of the season, and particularly so on Sunday, since there's been some melt-freeze action going on, and that area isn't in the sun until late in the day. So, I haven't really been to the exact spot. But I kind of hope I get the chance.

I put it out of my mind, like always, and focused on how much I was enjoying skiing and coaching the apprentices. They're improving, and I'm pretty sure they'll be ready in a couple weeks. The skiing got really good around 9:30, and since we got to start running sleds right from the start, we took a few runs off and just skied the soft spring snow over on Pizzazz and Cliffhanger. We would do that again later on. The bulk of the day was spent getting reps in running loaded sleds. Trying to observe two sled teams by myself was pretty taxing, but there isn't much one can do when the other scheduled coach doesn't show.

We paid for our turns later in the day by getting tasked to pull a crapload of rope lines at closing time. A great deal of the lower part of the bowl has been closed off because of poor snow coverage, but the area wanted the rope lines pulled in anticipation of the coming snow, since they'll be closed much of the week. But a task that big with 7 of us working was no problem at all.

I'd be remiss at this point if I didn't thank the people who got me back on skis after my injury, and to thumb my nose at the people who suggested I quit.

Thanks to:
My wife - I can't say enough about her support through it all. I would have been pretty miserable without all her help.
My surgeon - Dr. Montgomery did a great job, not only with the repair, but also just being a cool guy who took the time to make sure I knew as much as I could about what to expect and how to handle the whole process. He understood what my goals were, and made sure he was keeping them in mind every visit.
My physical therapist - Amanda did a great job tailoring a PT program that focused on the right things to get me back on my skis and feeling comfortable about the repair. All the balance work paid off in spades - I feel like I'm skiing better now than ever.

I don't think anyone who reads this was among those who suggested I quit skiing. But here's a nice frosty keg full of Shut The Fuck Up with a side dish of Kiss My Ass for them anyhow.

Getting Caught Up: Avy Refresher and Ski Days 15, 16, 17

Another bout of blogslackeritis has brought about a dry spell here, and also what could be a massive missive, if I were to write as much as I could about basically all of February from a skiing/patrolling standpoint.

But I won't.

Feb 6th was my avalanche refresher course, and I certainly was pleased to get through it. Usually, the refresher means tromping around the snowfield just above the Timberline climber's lot, and that nearly always means post-holing. That isn't fun, and in anticipation of such shenanigans, I wore my knee brace. I was glad I did. The refresher was, for all practical purposes, a series of avalanche transceiver practice scenarios. The weather was better than I expected, but still windy and cold for part of it. It did snow on us a little bit, but no huge accumulation. I still needed some more practice on dealing with multiple-burial scenarios, but I did get probe strikes within a very short time of locating the first transceiver of the full scenario at the end. The only thing that went a little wrong was that one of the transceivers must have had low battery power when it was buried, because we never did get a signal from it once the scenario started. Hopefully, we'll find it in the late spring...

Feb 14th was effing miserable, and that was in large part because I am an idiot for agreeing to train the available apprentices on Valentine's Day. This did not thrill the missus, who had just had surgery on her toe to deal with a bone spur and some loose tissue. As if to punish my idiocy, it rained and just generally sucked that day. I don't even remember how the guys did, but we ran empty sleds on Radical and Cannonball at Ski Bowl. I think they did okay for their first extended time in the handles. I do remember they did fine with uploading the sleds on the chair.

The 21st was a gorgeous day to train, and we were at Meadows that day. The patrollers on duty there told us we weren't needed to help with opening assignments, so we got to ski for almost an hour with nobody else on the mountain. The guys needed the work on their carving, so we did that. Unfortunately, the sleds we had couldn't be used with sled carriers, and it was windy enough that we weren't particularly enamored with the idea of lap-loading them probably 10 times each, so we worked on rope-a-goat to get the apprentices a whole bunch of time getting used to tail-roping. It was probably for the best, since tail-roping is the hardest part of toboggan handling anyway. It was a good day to have nice sharp edges, which I did. I've been really on top of tuning my skis this season. I just need a truing bar now, and maybe some sticks of p-tex and a metal scraper to take care of the little grooves that have appeared in my bases. Probably a new plastic scraper for wax, since the one I have is looking pretty rounded on the edges...

The 28th was a 'regular' patrol day for me, meaning I wasn't coaching apprentices. It was looking to be a very warm and sunny day at Ski Bowl, and it wasn't long before I had unzipped the armpit vents of my parka. I changed from my parka to my vest somewhere around 9:30 that morning. Beautiful day. I had the lower-bowl opening assignment with John A, and we did a ton of rope line work. We did such a good job, that we were asked to set one up for the 'speed trap' that was being run as part of the Fusion Series of ski/snowboard competitions. We didn't get to run it, but the fastest speed I heard was 64 mph. We did some more transceiver practice - a multiple burial - and did pretty respectable at it this time around. The snow started off pretty firm, but once the sun cooked it a bit, it got nice and soft and fun to ski. All in all, a pretty good day.

Through it all, the repaired knee has been handling things pretty well. It's almost always sore at the end, but I chalk that up to conditioning (my lack of it) just as much as I would chalk it up to just being how I expect it to be at about 10 months post-op. I need to get off my ass and start riding my exercise bike and stuff again, which I've started up last night. Watching Premier League soccer is a great thing to do while riding, since a half is 45 or more minutes solid with no need to reach for a remote to skip commercials, so I watched Arsenal beat Stoke City off the DVR.