AaronHat, originally uploaded by MissRancher.
Aaron tried it on before I had finished the i-cords….it didn’t fit his giant head quite as well.
February 2008
Monthly Archive
PinkHat, originally uploaded by MissRancher.
I finished my pink earflap hat, and it’s still cold enough to wear it.
We recently turned the basement from a junk room into the office. Since we got rid of all the junk, the fireplace is exposed so we can finally use it.
The cats have never been happier.
Aaron has his desk and office chair down there, so he can work on the computer with the fire going, and a cat in his lap. But, there’s no place for me to sit. We were talking about how nice it would be for me to be able to sit down there and enjoy the warmth of the fire as well. So we bought a glider with a matching gliding ottoman at Toys R Us on Saturday!
I sat there knitting, with one cat on the ottoman, one cat on the floor right next to the fire, and Aaron typing away.
Perfect.
I got my dog fix in today by volunteering at an adoption event for a local animal rescue organization. Throughout the course of the day I was paired up with about 4 different dogs. Two of them got adopted! It was so much fun being around all the dogs, and watching them play with each other – although it was really freaking cold. It was a nice way to be able to get to know the dogs’ personalities a little bit, and find out which ones were good with cats, etc.
I fell in love with a little 6 month old lab mix who had rottie colorings. She was the biggest sweetheart. I was *this* close to bringing her home as a foster dog. She’s so adorable, I’m sure she’ll be adopted pretty quickly.
There were two other smaller dogs that came in at the end that looked promising too, but some families were looking into them so they will probably be gone soon too.
Sigh.
Oh well, I’ll get to play with more dogs again next Saturday!
I should not be allowed to go into a yarn store for at least a year. I finally received the yarn I special ordered for Aaron’s sweater, and while I was in the shop picking it up, I started browsing. Not good.
Sigh.
The backstory is:
I have been lusting over some Manos del Uruguay yarn that I want to use to make a cardigan for myself. One day, as I was simultaneously drooling over some pictures of the colorway I want at on online shop and lamenting the price of said yarn, my blog reader updated. Kim had just posted a picture of the very same yarn, since she was lusting over it as well!!
What are the odds?
So I’m browsing the yarn store today and I notice…they carry Manos del Uruguay!! It’s still ridiculously expensive, so thank goodness they didn’t have the color I wanted in stock.
They did, however, have this lovely pink hank. It’s so pretty. So, so pretty.
So I bought a hank. You know, so I could knit a gauge swatch for that cardigan so when I finally do decide to splurge on the yarn, I’ll know what size needles to use. Yes, I plan ahead.
(PS: Yarn is always a good gift for a knitter, no matter the occasion)
But what to make with the rest of the yarn?
And so I remembered Kim…and I thought, Well, what would she like me to make for her with this yarn? She’s very stressed out studying for the bar, so maybe some knitted goodness would cheer her up…and it’s so pretty.
Stay tuned for the answer…
I knitted this for someone else, who for some strange reason became obsessed with it and had to have it. I obliged:
The pattern as a little jacked up, but after ripping the decrease out once, I figured it out.
Our last day! We slept in a little bit before heading out for our last day of riding. We went to Andesite, where we took some video of us doing some tricks. Nothing worth posting really, just some 180s, nose and tail presses, etc. But we had a blast.
Then we went back to the middle of the mountain to bomb some blues, and then back to Andesite. We were heading toward Africa, which was all moguls at the top, and very steep. We pulled up to a stop to figure out which way we wanted to go, and saw a lone skier with one ski on, trying to inch his way back up to the top of the slope, where his other ski sat waiting for him. He was pretty far down the hill, and he looked tired and was moving slowly, so I slid down to his ski and brought it to him – trying to make a good name for snowboarders, one good deed at a time! lol He said, with obvious relief, “Boy, am I glad you came along!” I wished him a Happy Valentine’s Day and we were off.
The bottom part of that run is great for awesome wall rides. It was so much fun riding up as high as we could go and then surfing back down through all the powder. That was probably the best part of the day. It was a clear day too, so I loved riding the lifts and being able to see the incredible views all around us.
After five days of boarding, we were ready to call it and head in.
The best part of this mountain, by far, is the lack of lift lines. Even on the weekend when it was ‘busy’, we were never in a line longer than maybe 2 minutes, if that. It’s just so empty! All day today we were alone on the slopes.
Tonight we are off to the Timbers, a ‘fancy’ restaurant in Moonlight Basin, for our Valentine’s Day dinner. Then up at the crack of dawn to catch our 5.30am shuttle to the airport!
Today was just an absolutely ridiculous powder day. We decided to head over to the south side of the mountain – I wanted to check out the bowl.
It was…insane. So. Much. Powder. Witness:
Just getting from the top of the lift to where we could drop into the bowl was sketchy. We were in a controlled, or I guess monitored, environment, but it was still sketchy as hell. It felt like at any moment we could trigger a mini-avalanche and get swept down into the bowl. It was a little freaky. The powder was just sooooo deep. It was hard to do anything but submarine through it, and try to ride out the air pockets.
Once we were able to drop into the bowl, it was better. But man, it really wore my back leg out surfing through all that! Toward the bottom I just backed into a tail press and surfed straight out of the bowl – that was in-freaking-credible. So much fun!
We tried a few more runs we hadn’t hit before, and found some good ones. We hit the natural half pipe on one run. We were pretty wiped and after a bit more over at Andesite, we called it a day.
Here’s the bowl we were neck-deep in powder in:
Did I say yesterday was a powder day? Wrong. Today was a powder day! It snowed all night and was still going strong when we got up. It’s still snowing right now, in fact. The conditions were incredible. Super powder! We cut today short so I’ll post some pics as well.
Aaron bought a new bag so he could take his camera with him, as well as extra layers since the temps here can vary wildly depending where on the mountain you are:
Oh, and here’s our room:
So back to today!
We hit the greens first to practice switch some more, and I was happy about the speed I was getting. But our legs were getting really tired – I guess I shouldn’t have tried so many 180s, since they take a lot out of me.
We headed over to the Shedhorn lift, which is on the south side of the mountain. You have to go over some really long cat tracks, called Cow Flats – and that killed us. We had to unstrap and skate for a while, and it was just exhausting. Shedhorn is a two seater lift, and really long. My friend had told us that it was really ‘bony’ at the top, but it got better as you went further down the slope. It was a bit more than bony – rocks galore. The drop in to the trail was too rocky for me. Not worth scraping my board to hell just to hit one run. So we took Duck Walk back to the other side of the mountain, but by now it was near white out conditions. It was a narrow cat track, with a wall of rocks on one side, and a sheer drop off into a rocky bowl on the other side. They kindly built up a bit of a snow lip before the drop off, but it didn’t make it that much more comforting. It would have been ok had we been able to see where we were going, but visibility was extremely poor. I almost caught an edge at one point, and I started veering toward the rock face, thinking how glad I was I had my helmet on but those rocks looked like they could cut right through my jacket – and would I hit hard enough to bounce me back across the trail and over the edge? I fell right before my board hit the rocks, but then I had to unstrap and skate back down the trail for a bit. I was beyond tired.
We rested a bit before hitting the blue that would take us back to the base. Here’s a pic of Africa:
Resting before heading down:
We veered off to the right at the bottom of that hill, where the powder was practically untouched. We were doing wall rides the whole way, and they were pretty steep, and so much fun – made me feel a little bit more inclined to check out the natural half pipe later! I did some more tail presses through the powder – man was that fun, but it killed my back leg. I had to stop for a bit before I felt like I could go on.
On the way down, I did a wall ride and then cut between a dad who was trying to teach his kid how to board. I was going kind of slow, so I heard him say, as he pointed at me, “See how that guy is leaning forward, into the mountain as he rides? That’s what you want to do, don’t lean back!” And I was thinking, you can totally see my pigtails, dude! I guess I need to replace my helmet with a pink one…
After that, we headed in – and we’re heading out to the hot tub right now!
But first, some more pics.
Lone Peak, in the background:
Courtney and me:
Courtney, me, and the bear:
The view:
The wide ass trail, and I couldn’t even fit it all in the frame:
Today was awesome. It snowed overnight, so there was tons of fresh powder in the morning. We were up bright and early, so the snow was still fresh. We have never seen powder like that before – it was beyond incredible. We stayed on Andesite for the morning since the conditions were so great. I got some really good tail slides down, and when you do it through powder, it really feels like you’re floating. Aaron looked like he was surfing as he did a tail slide through some untouched powder.
We practiced our switch a lot, because it hurts so much less to fall on powder, so I felt more confident and able to commit to my transitions. And it was great! We went switch almost the whole way down one of the long green runs, and I feel much better about my transitions now. I got in some 180’s as well, both front and backside. So it was a phenomenal morning, but also very tiring.
We grabbed some lunch and headed back out to another part of the mountain, up Swift Creek Lift, to hit some blues. We got in a few good runs, we took some video of each other, and Aaron got a nice shot of one of my ollies.
We decided to venture into the terrain park to end the day. I have never gone off a kicker in the park before – and these were good sized kickers! I knew I wasn’t going to try ollie-ing any of them, since I didn’t want to catch more air than I could handle, and I wanted to get familiar with landing a jump like that first. I ended up only hitting two that first run and one on the next, and then we went in. It was a little intimidating riding up such a steep angle, and not being able to spot your landing until you’re in the air. I stomped them all pretty solidly, so maybe tomorrow I’ll have enough nerve to try and catch some decent air. We’ll see. We might also head to the side of the mountain with some trees instead.
We took the bus down to the town for dinner and some shopping. And when I say bus, I mean an old school bus. With no suspension. On snowy, winding mountain roads. Which are also very, very bumpy in town. That was interesting. We had dinner at Uncle Milkie’s which was actually really good, home made pizza, wings, and meatballs.
All in all, a great day!