blog.erik.rainey.name

Here's a view from below of McConkey's Run. This is a double black diamond run at Park City in Utah. I think that most other resorts would classify this as a black diamond, but it was still rather hard.

Update: I just updated the blog here to the most stable version of Typo (rev 1256) so the layout of the image to the right here is a little weird. It seems to overlap the post instead of leting the post flow around it.

On a different note, it seems that the vacation caused a bit of a setback on the diet program. Just before the trip I was at the 40lbs mark, now, well, subtract 2.2lbs to that.

Dirk, Nicole, Scott and I just got back from our most recent ski jaunt to Park City, UT. I think I speak for all of us when I say that we all had a great time hanging out and hitting the slopes.
During this trip I switched from my normal skis to Ski Blades. They're basically a short, half-length ski, which are super agile. This new found agility made it possible for me to try some harder faire on the mountain, namely McConkey's Run, a double black diamond. As you might imagine, it was rather daunting. The top of the run starts as a near-cliff-edge from a blue run that traces the spine of the mountain. Since I'm not suicidal I decided to try an approach that was a bit less steep. We were able to start at the extreme edge of the run and ski diagonally into the main field of moguls. From there we slowly worked our way downwards through the main body of the run. Suprisingly, this was not the hardest skiing we did on the trip. It was perhaps the most unforgiving though, as Nicole and a small boy who nearly rocketed past us on his belly can attest to.

As a part of our obsession with recording our ski-ventures, I made a few movies myself skiing. I thought about recording myself of the double diamond but thought better of it. Instead I recorded myself going down a single diamond run with some moguls and some smooth parts. Here's Naildriver Pt.1

Naildriver Pt.2

And finally Naildriver Pt.3

Scott and I just got back from a ski trip with the North Texas Skiers Club in Winter Park Colorado. Overall, we had an awesome time, but that's not to say that there weren't problems.

On Wednesday we met the other club members in the parking lot of Six Flags in the afternoon. The bus was a sleeper bus, which I had never been on. All the seats are arranged around 10 tables and convert to "beds". I use a qualifier for that because it was obvioulsy not made for someone of my size. The waking hours of the trip were interesting in that we got to meet and get to know that other people at our table. However, you run out of things to talk about on a 15 hour trip. Once we had dinner at a TA center in Amarillo, we watched the Bourne Identity on the bus, while continuing our trek into the dark wastes of west Texas and New Mexico. Even though I've seen this movie before and I know how it goes, it bugged me that several people kept standing up in the middle of the flick , obscuring the TV, and obstructing my enjoyment of the movie, while they fetched cookies or drinks from the snack station, cleverly placed directly under the TV.

We "awoke" (some of us didn't get much sleep in the swaying midget-beds) to the sharp curves of the mountain pass near Winter Park. We made our seats back up (the construction of the sleeper portion of the bus is rather odd. Where 4 people sit at a table slightly uncomfortably, 4 people sleep very uncomforatably, even though there are 2 levels to the bed. Everyone changed into their ski stuff at the lodge, once we got there, and headed up the mountain. Incidently, our room wasn't ready, so we had to change in someone else's room.

The first day on the moutain was a bit icy. Most people don't like that sort of snow but since my style of skiing is more of a differential sliding approach, it wasn't that bad. As long as I had a somewhat constant coefficient of sliding friction, I did fine.

We didn't have a lot of luck on the lifts the first day. I accidenlty skied over an older guy's ski while waiting for the lift and apologized but I got the stink-eye in response. Later, Scott and I took a hard fall, while attempting to get on a smaller lift for the top of the mountain. One of us stepped on the other's ski and when the lift tried to pick us up, we both were flung bodily to the ground. the lift then proceeded to smack the back of my helmet and bang my head into the ground. I wasn't hurt (nor was Scott) but we were rather embarrased.

Later, James gave us a short lesson on the correct method to ski, which I had been ignorant of up to then. While it's hard to describe in text, it basically boils down to keeping your ski pole tips just barely skidding on the surface. This keeps your upperbody correctly centered over your feet and with your weight on the correct foot.

At the end of the day, Scott and I and most of the club retired to the hot tub. I think I stayed in too long because I later became very close to barfing at dinner. Only later in the trip did I notice the warning sign in the hot tub area which warned against this rather obvious behavior.

During my nausea stint, it started snowing again, and by morning, it had left about 6 inches on the ground.

The next day, Scott and I had a good run around the mountain in the fresh powder. Now, while I don't like powder (because of my skiing style), I did enjoying trying the stuff on the easier runs. Later, we tried Mary Jane, which is a fairly difficult blue run, with a short blue-black section. Scott wiped out on that harder area while I copped out and slide down in sideways.

At the end of the skiing day, we kipped off the local bar and had a round with the club and then retired to the hot tub again. After that, Ruben, Scott and I took off and had dinner at a local german restraunt. We overheard a conversation at another table, with 4 very old gentlemen who were talking about scientific issues with another table. One quipped "we're too old to have sex lives, so we have to talk about kelvins." When the other table asked why there were having a discussion on the topic.

On the third day, the snow had re-iced and been groomed into a very usable medium. We started late, and went straight to the NASTAR race. On the way there I managed to attain my longest continuous run of skiing that I can recall (that is skiing without stopping to rest). We lined up for the race and got our numbers. The first time I did the run I was just planning on doing the run in a technical way so that I was comformtable going fast on the second run. Well, my first run was ended up being 39 seconds but I managed to trim some time off the second run and pulled it down to 35 seconds. You had to get 28.5 to get a Bronze medal though.

Scott and I left the mountain early that day and headed back to the hot tub. I think we left just in time because the bottom of the mountain was almost all sludge. We went out again that night but the Italian place we went to was not as nice as the german place was on the previous night.

On Sunday we tooled around the downtown area of Winter Park, buying some t-shirts and stuff. We boarded the bus and set out for Dallas at about 1pm. There were some rather scenic vistas on the way back in Colorado and New Mexico but I'm not particularly good at photography from a moving bus. When we finally got back, and after Scott dropped me off at my place at 5 am or so, I just crashed until 12pm.

Since Scott took most of the photos for the trip, I'll just link to his photos.

Well I'm back from Snowbird Utah, my 5th Ski Trip. Scott has posted an enormously long and time consuming journal entry on the experience, to which I would like to snipe-in the following comments. I'll state these in relation to the timeline of events described in Scott's post/page/long winded emotional diary entry into the innerworkings of his heart.

Day Zero: When the "sisters" decended upon us, my first instinct was to engage in the conversation in a way to divert the flow away from overt religious dialogue and into something tangentially related and time-consumming. Basically I knew I had to stall them while Scott went and got the car. Now, every Mormon I've met in my life has been very friendly and hasn't pushed their religious beliefs on anyone. These two Sister were no different. They simply were trained (oh yes, highly trained) operatives in the art of conversation steering. I tried to throw obstacles in their way. I poured out every vaguely art-related item noteworthy of interest I could remember from the gallery and the wax figures and such. I definitely got the drop on them and sent them realing! Adam's artsy training must have rubbed off on me. But they countered hard with an assertion that they didn't get most of what I said (i barely did!) and inquired if I was an art major. At this point I think I relaxed too much and left my guard down. They then asked what else we learned while we were there! Ack! In one or two sentences more, they had dropped the bomb and the cat was out of the bag. We were enemy units in the very beating heart of the monster. Nicole became concise at this point and refused to answer questions with anything other than a yes or no or a brief commment. I decided that we could still stall them while buying Scott some time with the car. One of the sister started asking why weren't believers and I gave her an earful of talk about how your emotions should be a reflection of what you value and I tried to couch the langugae in something familiar to her. She countered with a bible verse. Scott messaged me that he had shown up before she finished. We stood there and took the quickly read and rather uninspiring passage with courteous patience as we edged to the door and told the Sister that our ride was here. We escaped into the snowy night, eager to be outside the compound walls.

Day One: While Scott and Nicole were having their Italian Dinner with Wishing Tree Shiraz (which I later found to be slightly tart), I was slumming at Friday's, watching the SuperBowl closing show and scarfing on a Zen potstickers appetizer followed by a Jack Daniel's Pulled Pork sandwich entree and finally closing with a Cinnabon Cheesecake (sinnfully delicious!). I felt awful after the first day of skiing. My calves were sore, my cold was drowning me in body fluids and I had a mild headache. All in all, better than I've ever felt after a first day skiing! ;).

Day Two: While I always feel that not taking the slope down the mountain is a cop-out, I plead that I am a fat lazy bastard with little endurance, oh and I had a cold. I knew that I was at the end of my rope after doing the Mineral Basin so many times on the backside of the Mountain that day. After getting to the bottom, my chest congestion decided that it wanted out and preceded to request shore-leave for several minutes. We all crashed in Scott and Nicole's Room afterwards. My raspy breathing caused concern on Nicole's part, but was not seriously imparing my ability to breath.

Day Three: I'm still not sure how Scott convinced me to run a blue/black, but he did manage to. At this point in my sickness cycle I was getting some stomach and abdominal trouble that was, shall we say, providing motiviation to get down the mountain. I found that by having this motiviation, I was not nearly as concerned about tumbling down the mountain-side to my untimely death as I might otherwise had been. I took to the slope rather quickly and with no reservations for height, as I would normally have. I think this was not only caused by my previous mentioned insiprations, but also by the visual elements of the environment. This run begins in a rather large bowl concavity in the Mountain. There isn't anything to fall off of (once you are past the road sections, which I'll speak about at length later), and there was a long section of area with which you could bleed off excess speed. To me, this indicates a rather safe environment for some slightly feckless recklessness. I let myself get going faster than I would normally be comfortable with and as a result got down the first part of the slopes rather quickly for my tastes. The rest of the run was a series of controlled bursts that would culminate in a protracted array of rest stops; normal skiing for me. The bathroom at 9000ft was never more inviting. All in all that day was turning point in the trip and in my ailment. I felt less tired than I did the previous days and my cold was more pronounced.

Day Four: This day was actually quite good, even with the bad powder experience. I did the backside runs far more times than I thought I could. Even though, in retrospect I think that I could have gone down the front side of the mountain with Scott and Nicole, I didn't want to chance the possibility of doing something rash or foolish on the way down since I have another trip schedule for Sunday (to France, on business). I felt distinctly less tired on this day than any other. This, of course, could have been due to the side effects of the medications I was on, but I like to think that I was getting my wind, you know, after I needed it.

And finally I'd like to leave some general comments.

• My skiing style (the controlled skid or differential sliding) does not work at all in "powder". As such I detest it (powder) and refute any claim on it's awesomeness. It is quite unawesome, Sir; quite unawesome indeed!
• Roads turned into ski paths suck, ... hard. I'd rather ski a choppy blue/black run than hit a long 9% grade road covered in snow. These runs drain the very life from your body, much like a level 20 Lich would.
• Courvoisier is a man's drink; a Ladies Man's Drink.</wink>

Even if you can't get a room in the "The Inn" while you're nursing that baby skiing addiction, I would suggest that you take a trip up that windy Little Cottonwood Canyon road. All in all it was a great trip.