Winter Park 2006

Posted by Scott Hughes Wed, 12 Apr 2006 18:23:00 GMT

From April 5th thru April 10th, Erik and I joined the North Texas Skiers on their trip to Winter Park, CO. The trip is a pretty good deal, costing only $339 for 4 nights lodging (dinner and breakfast buffet included) and transportation (on a sleeper bus). Just like for our Snowbird trip earlier this year, I wrote a short novel describing all of the major events I want to remember. If you have a lot of spare time and don’t mind my below-average narration skills, you can read my full ski log for Winter Park. Honestly, you can just skip that and get all the important stuff from my pictures.

The best part about skiing with the North Texas Skiers was all the great advice we got. Some of the skiers on the trip had about 30 years of ski experience on us, so they had a lot of advice to pass on.

  • James coached us with the same tips he’d gotten from a recent mogul lesson. Improved my edging remarkably.
  • Joe told us about “pivot turns” and how to use them to keep out of the crud. He also convinced me that I need to get an edge sharpener, even for my rental skis.
  • Patti convinced me to try skiboards (the short skis, used without poles) on my next trip. She claims that it’s much easier for her to do harder runs with them.
  • Richard sold me on the importance of having a custom boot insole made for better ski stability. If you don’t have an even foot pressure on the bottom of your boot, you are creating pivot points for the ski to wiggle underneath you.

Despite a pretty rough bus ride (in both directions), it was a fun trip. We ended up with 8 inches of fresh powder on our second day, so you can’t complain about the skiing. I’ll likely just try the shorter bus runs next year (Taos is only 9 hours) and see how that works out for us.

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Snowbird 2006

Posted by Scott Hughes Fri, 10 Feb 2006 17:50:00 GMT

Just got back from our 4th annual ski trip. We went to Snowbird mountain resort near Salt Lake City, Utah. We had a fantastic ski vacation. I’ll have lots of pictures and video available soon (once Erik stops holding them hostage). In the meantime, I wrote up a short novel describing nearly every major event of the trip. I wished I’d done this for every ski trip we’ve done, just for my own edification. I don’t expect anyone (not even my friends) to read the whole thing, so here are some highlights:

  • Nicole and Erik got attacked by Mormon proselytizers at the Mormon Temple Square Visitor’s Center.
  • Nicole and I skied a lot of fresh powder, going off-trail whenever possible.
  • I convinced Erik and Nicole to join me on a very intimidating black diamond run, which was quite an accomplishment.
  • Nicole got a great video of me crashing a jump I did off a little snow ramp.
  • The Mineral Basin ski area (the backside of Snowbird) is one of the most beautiful ski areas I’ve seen. The bowls of snow seem to go on forever.

Here is my full Ski Log for Snowbird 2006. I’ll post a link to the pictures and videos as soon as I free them from Erik’s tyrannical hold.

Update: The complete Snowbird 2006 photoset is up on flickr. Working on converting the video to a reasonable distribution size.

Update: Loaded the video of me crasing a jump on Ourmedia.org, which is very slow. I uploaded it to Google Video as well, but it hasn’t been verified yet. When it’s uploaded there, I think I’ll try embedding the player in the full ski log. Until then, try watching it on my ourmedia page.

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