A Cold, Clear Day of Skiing

Every direction I looked it was beautiful. Cold, but beautiful. Yesterday my friends Nancy, Leigh and I skied the Beav. When we pulled into the parking lot just before 10 AM Leigh's car said it was -10 degress outside. It was a little hard to belive that a landscape so glistening and picture-perfect could be so cold.

We donned all our gear and headed out for a day on the slopes. Nancy is in yellow (Big Bird), Leigh is in green (Oscar), and I'm in pink (Zoe). Right off we ran into my cousin Tiffany, in blue (Grover). Our Sesame Street gang spent the first half of the morning together before Tiffany had to check back in with the ski school -- she's an instructor with them.




Because of the cold temperatures, we'd ski down a ways, take a breather to let our faces defrost and the "ice cream" headaches wear off a bit before completeing the run. Usually when I go skiing I'm coldest on the lift going up, and skiing down the mountain warms me up, but not yesterday. Riding the lift was balmy compared to the wind factor temps we experienced while skiing down. Leigh said, "It's a good thing my kids aren't up here today. They'd be bawling, it's so cold!" On one of the afternoon runs when the wind kicked up a bit, I even tried skiing backwards to keep the wind from sending biting pieces of ice into my face. But skiing backwards involves snowplowing backwards, and parrallel skiing with legs close together actually proved warmer than skiing backwards.

Here's Leigh, Nancy, and Tiffany on Sunshine. Sunshine was a favorite run as it didn't entail going too fast and was always in the sun. (Shadowy runs were especially chilling.)









I have perfected the skill of taking self-photos! This is Big Bird, Oscar and me on Marge's Triple. This was one of the times that we provided comic relief to anyone who happened to be watching as we got off the chair lift. Nancy about turfed it, but we all managed to stay upright. On another run Leigh was in the middle and, again, we provided a laugh for a couple of watching ski patrollers. They also recognized us when they came into the lodge for lunch. When it came time to head home (a little early) we informed them that they could go home too, as the mountain was now safe with us gone.



All in all, it was an awesome day. A cold day skiing beats a cold day spent anywhere else!