Near-Death

Added another resort to my list of "places I've skied" this past weekend. Since the snow's been crappy, I had not desire to lap ice at the Bird, so I went to Solitude with the boy. Cool resort. We started out on Challenger, which is an excellent groomed run. . . if you have edges. In getting my skis professionally tuned I forgot to tell them not to relieve the edges, so even slightly icy terrain has proven. . . interesting. Regardless, it was warm and sunny and I got to see a lot of the resort; looks like a cool place.

After a couple of groomers we headed up to what I was told was Honeycomb Basin, and we went through a gate on (skier's) left side of the bowl. The traverse was icy and longggg (I definitely need to get into better shape for that), plus my bum knee was downhill which was very tiring. Anyway, we finally made it to the gate we were entering back into the main part of the resort through and. . . well I don't know how much I've discussed my impressive gracefulness, but I ended up diving my tip into the heavy slush of the next traverse and falling off. Took me 20 minutes to get my skis back on, then we started skiing down the area I'd fallen into.

Unfortunately, the signs that read "cliff area" were not lying to us, and the snowpack wasn't deep enough to make the one narrow gully skiable. Thus our ski day turned into a mini mountaineering expedition, where we ended up downclimbing a 15-20' section of rocks. Now I'm not a rock climber, and climbing in ski boots is just wrong (especially when they're my Fischer race boots and not my Dynafits). Fortunately we made it down without dying, grabbed our gear (one of my skis had slid down when I clicked out, and the other was carried down for me; Mark had to ski down much further with only one ski because his brakes decided not to function properly). After another time-consuming period of getting skis on again (hard to do while post-holing up to your hip in heavy slush) I managed a few turns before crossing my tips, double-ejecting, and torquing my hip and bad knee.

The stream of profanity that followed was directed only at myself, but Mark definitely felt like he was in the cross-hairs since he'd been leading. After what passed directly after that I can say this: Saturday was the day my boyfriend tried to kill me.

I prefer to ski my steeper side, and not climb it, at least when snow is involved.