Watercolors

It was on Wednesday, January 5th, that my brother spontaneously walked into the room and said "Hey, we could go skiing."

I haven't been skiing in over six years, not since the spring before I moved to England. That spring, we were up in Mammoth, California, during one of the most horriffic storms they had in years. Blizzard conditions. Needless to say, a lot of the mountain was closed on most days. Sometimes, we would be able to get somewhere, but the temperature was roughly thirty below zero, the snowfall had limitted visibility to only a few dozen yards, and the general consensus was that the combination of me and snowglobe environments don't mix too well.

Hesitantly, I said I would go. First off, because I wanted to get back into skiing (and put the last trip behind me) and also because Snow Summit had just gotten several inches of fresh snow from the last storm. We were also in the break between storms and had a day of clear sunshine in the forecast. It was a gamble, but we went up.

The beauty about living in Southern California is that you can go to the beach where it's nice and warm, then only two hours drive to get to Big Bear, the area's ski resort, where they'll have perfect conditions. We left just before sunrise, hit the freeway, and by nine o'clock that morning, we already had our equipment rented and lift tickets purchased. The day was promising to be good. Indeed it was. Now remember, I hadn't been skiing in about six years. So naturally, dad decides to warm me up nice and easily with a go on a simple, non-threatening looking run. The wall. The resort's resident double black diamond run. And they don't call it "the wall" for nothing. It literally is, as suggested, a near vertical slope.

I got past that with little trouble, still reclaiming my bearings. I then did several more runs, started getting back into jumps, then doing runs straight down, and by lunch time, I was back to where I had left off. It's like riding a bicycle.

It was while passing through what is called "the family fun zone" that disaster struck. Naturally, I had spent the entire morning doing double diamonds and running of gigantic jumps, and it was in the harmless looking "family fun zone" that I eventually ate crap off of what had to be a jump no more than eight inches in height. It was at the arc of the jump, when I was angled just about sideways (just about, my head being a little bit lower than my feet), that I braced for the inevitable crash and inevitable applause from the chairlift above.

"Aha, yes, yes, thank you! How about a standing ovation!?" I yell up to the cheering snowboarders lazily passing by overhead, their feet dangling and swinging with glee at the sight of seeing a fat man faceplant off the world's most innocent looking jump on the slope.

I took it easier for the rest of the day, as I found myself in a hypnotic daze for the rest of the day, suffering from a headache after the disasterously emberrassing flop. My goggles also got a nasty crack running down the side of it, too, slightly inhibitting my visibility.

At the tail end of the day, I did my last run. I had my camera dangling around my neck, and I took many stops on the way down just to snap what I considered to be rather interesting sunset. It's strange what the clouds do at that elevation, and it's interesting to find yourself so close to them at seven and a half thousand feet above sea level. They passed by much faster, their details more intricate, and their patterns and swirling seemed much more chaotic as they rumbled and marched over the mountaintops.

Thus I share. My spontaneous ski trip, planned roughly eighteen hours in advance.