Ski Trip #1

This weekend I went on my first ski trip in Oregon to Mt. Bachelor.  We got a house in SunRiver, a local community about 20 minutes drive from the mountain.  The log cabin was beautiful!  It had a
stove, kitchen, upstairs with beds, hot tub outside, and a river running through the backyard.  14 people went on the trip for the two nights and we
each paid 50 bucks.  That money paid for the two nights at the house and food for chili on Friday night and sphagetti on Saturday night.  I just received an email after getting home saying that we would all get $20 back as well because we paid too much!  Can you believe that, $30 dollars bought me two nights at a ski chateau with a hot tub and dinner both nights!!! Amazing!


    I left school on Friday around 4pm and picked up Javier and David for the 3 hour ride over Santiam Pass through Bend to SunRiver.  I’d never met either before but
they turned out to be great guys.  As a matter of fact, the only people I knew on the trip beforehand were Meg and her husband
Justin, Kristen Splinter, and fellow new COAS student Greg.  It was great to meet so many terrific people and have such a good time.  When the three of us got there we ate a ton of homemade chili by Kristen and began drinking.  At 9pm a car load of girls showed up as well;  Jen, Lindsay, Julie, and Susie.  Then another car showed up with Matt who had told me he wasn’t going to need a ride because he had to write a paper instead!  Haha.  I
had bought a litre of 93 proof rum and began to get pretty drunk on
Friday night.  Most of the rest of the night was a bit blurry which I fully understood after waking up Saturday morning still a bit drunk to the empty bottle.  I apparently had played beer pong late into the morning hours with Matt but don’t recall it!  I also spent some time in the hot tub with the girls which was foggy as well.  I was told in the morning that the tracks in the snow next to the hot tub were of me running around before jumping back in!  One thing was for sure… I certainly let loose a lot of built up stress that night and had a hell of a good time.


    When I woke up Saturday morning I was still a bit drunk and had a cup of sphagetti
I had brought for myself and a couple v8’s.  Ironically I was the first
person with my eyes open at 8:30 running around to get my stuff ready.  David and I left for the mountain following Meg and Justin around 9:30am.  Bachelor was an amazing dormant volcanoe rising into the sky with beautiful views of Broken Back and The Sisters wilderness.  It was bluebird skies and despite the $60 holiday ticket price and crowds the lift lines were not horrible. 

    I do have to say I hate the lift line ticket-checking procedure there.  Each ticket
had to be swiped next to a large electronic board for verification
before a turnstile, that’s right, a freakin’ turnstile opened for you to walk through and re-join your group for the actual lift line.  I thought it was the stupidest system I have ever seen and much prefer the old school style of having a person there to interact with and guide you into place.  What is the skiing world coming to??? 

    The terrain was incredible.  The top of the volcano was massive bowls above
treeline and the below treeline the trees were perfectly separated for tree skiing.  Unfortunately the snow was very windblown up in
the bowl resulting in a sheet of ice several football fields in length with a pitch of about 45 degrees.  I got separated from David around lunch time and headed up to the summit to ski the bowl and had to straight-line most of it because it was impossible to turn on the
ice.  Luckily for the slope shallowed out into flats at the bottom so I could slow down.  After skiing from the summit (first time on the summit of a volcano) I headed down the mountain towards the terrain park I had heard so much about.  There was some fresh snow on the mountain
but it was only an inch or two deep and on top of hard crusty snow so backcountry skiing wasn’t much of an option as I had just figured out from the summit descent.  So off to the park I went. 

    Mt. Bachelor has one of the best terrain parks I’ve ever been to
and definitely the best superpipe I’ve ever ridden.  My balance was off because of drinking so much the previous night but I still challenged myself to hit the biggest jumps
offered and boost out of the pipe.  I ended up getting only about 5 or 6 feet out of the pipe but it was the highest
I saw anyone go while there and I managed to spin a mute 360 off a kicker in the park that sent me about 15-20 feet up and 40-50 feet in length.  If I had better balance I would have perhaps tried something a little bit harder… oh well.  When I got back to my truck I found a note left by David that he had gotten a ride home with others earlier… I guess I was the last person of our group off the mountain.

    Saturday night I took it a bit easier.  I played Anchorman for the group off my ipod which everyone enjoyed and then put on my High School Hip-Hop playlist.  This combined with drinking led to a drunken dance party that lasted about 2 hours.  Everyone got a kick out of the songs I had on my list that were all popular hip-hop and R&B songs before 1998.  Brought back a lot of memories for everyone I’m sure.  I was also blown away to hear an echo behind me as Young M.C.’s Bust a Move came on…  Meg Palmsten knew every word.  She’s only the 2nd girl I’ve ever met to know that song perfectly!  Haha.  I ended up teaching the girls how to play Bullshit Pyramid before covering Matt with snowboards, a plant and chair as he was passed out face down on the floor.  I’m not sure what time I went to bed but at least I went to bed in my own sleeping bag unlike Friday night when I woke up in someone else’s on the hard floor 10 feet from my blown up air mattress…. Geeze.  Although throughout the night I did have to hurl pillows and other objects at someone across the room snoring like a freight train!

    Nobody decided to ski on Sunday morning because we all knew it would be too icy and not worth the money.  So after cleaning up our mess for a couple hours we packed up and drove home, but not before Justin decided to nearly plunge his Honda Element into a nearby drainage ditch on the way out of SunRiver.  Luckily we found some chains and pulled him and Meg out.  Haha.  It was a great weekend of meeting new friends outside of my COAS bubble, drinkin’, partying and skiing.  Ski Trips are always a great time!