Snowboarding at Mountain High

Today I went snowboarding at Mountain High with Brian, Than, Tom, and some of Than's family and friends. Woke up at 4am to get ready, drove up there and got in just in time to beat the rush. It was great. It's been about 6 years since I've been snowboarding so I had to remind my body how to do it, but it only took about 10 seconds before I had it all figured out again which was really nice. Tom has never done it before so we spent the first half of the day showing him how and giving him pointers as we went down.

Eventually I decided I was going to run some black diamonds and one of Than's friends and I took off to find some harder trails. I sort of have this infectious habit of trying to find the most ridiculous dangerous forest trail and go balls out down it on my snowboard, just to see where it leads me at the other end. Sometimes it comes back out onto a trail, sometimes I end up lost and have to hike back up...but it's almost always fun. So I decided to look for some glade/forest trails, and Than's friend warned me that they would probably not have any snow since this mountain was almost all man-made snow. At the time when he said "no snow" I assumed he meant it would be dry, so when I saw a path with snow on it I thought, "woot, snow". I signaled to him, turned down the path, and immediately knew I was wrong and what he actually meant by "no snow" was that it would be "all ice". I immediately started sliding and lost control for about 20-30 yards sliding down steep solid ice through a dense forest until I finally grabbed on to a tree branch enough to turn a little and lodge myself against a small pine tree. My crappy rental snowboard wouldn't grip the ice one bit so I had to unstrap and chisel foot holds for myself to hike back up and out the side on to the main trail. It was pretty freaking scary! At one point I lost my footing and started to slide down but was able to punch through the ice and grab some ground and stopped myself. It was about an 80 degree slope with like 100 gnarly trees below. I probably would have been very, very, VERY injured. But alas, I don't suck, and made it out just fine. So the adventure in between trails was a bit of a failure, but I came out with a cool story for the day and made it back just fine. Pure awesome.

By the end of the day the trails were icing up and all of our bodies were sore as could be, so we called it quits and headed home.

The mountain is decent for only being 90 minutes away from Los Angeles. It's VERY crowded and has rather poor quality snow, but again, it's 90 minutes away and I hadn't been in over half a decade (doesn't that make it sound longer than 6?) so who am I to complain. I had a great time!