A BIT GUSTY

Around 2 am Jordan came into the room with Tatum. Jordan was surprisingly calm and compassionate for being up for hours trying to get Tatum to lay down. I attempted to keep my head down and act like I was asleep so Tatum wouldn’t notice me and get excited . . but I had to adjust my neck and sure enough I heard a, “bah” ". . “dah”. After a while of rubbing her back attempting to get her to take Tylenol and shhing she Finally fell back to sleep. I was stuck awake for a bit feeling some lingering stress about work but eventually feel asleep feeling excited for the morning.

SNOW STAKE

Going to bed drifting into dreams of 12-20 inches of powder as I had read on the forecast set up me to get out of bed excited for the day. I didn’t have much to do in the morning outside of tossing the Hatch Chilie sausages into the oven and getting my camera gear into my ski pack. The morning had other plans. As soon as I woke up it smelled like burning plastic - I got the dogs to come with me so I can keep the door shut for the girls. Nora instantly starting barking and jackson followed suit. I got the dogs to eat and quite down and then I attempted to investigate the smell in the house to no avail. I also checked the snow stake. 1.5 inches. Dang! When I texted bobby about the snow he was already aware of the let down. He seemed pretty ready to bail but he said he needed a few minutes to think about it. Shortly after we talked on the phone we decided to bail.

I was bummed about not going skiing. I started looking at pictures of last year around the time and I had already skied 4 times. One of the times was an epic morning on outback by myself listening to a great playlist. Luckily, while I was looking back on pictures, trying to come up with a way to make the day fun and productive, bobby texted me saying he saw Pete Alports story and it looked pretty decent up there. Thank God for bobby’s FOMO.

CONDITIONS

Bobby and I decided to carpool on the way up which made for a good hang. We weren’t totally sure what we wanted to ski and tossed up the idea of scoping out tumalo to see if there was enough coverage on the bowl. Tumalo would have been a pretty big day because we would have likely had to hike up and down a lot of sections rather than skin. We ended up settling for going to sunrise.

Snow coverage was boney at the start but we were able to slap skins on right at the car. Mid way up sunrise the visibility started getting pretty minimal. We had a few pockets of god vis that insprired a bit more confidence for being able to dodge rocks on the way down. We both felt pretty inshape - our starting of the season with a massive day like the hayden glacier a few weeks back has become of a bit of a tradition and it definelty jumpstarted out bodies and brains for touring.