Ski day catch-up

I've been woefully bad about keeping up on my ski day tracking. Here's a quick rundown of my last hadnful of ski days.

Dec 24, Xmas eve: Chase and Tara were in town, so I borrowed Brooke's Silver Card and met them up at Alta. There was no significant new snow, but it was warm and the snow was soft.

Dec 28: Tara and I decided to do a tele day up at Solitude on Friday. First run of the day, I lost control and had a stupid little fall, just falling over onto my hands. As I stood up, I thought "uh, oh" - my back was screaming. I figured I had pulled something, but I wanted to keep skiing. We went back to the car to get my other skis. We lasted until about noon, and I had to get home to ice my back. It was ugly. Jamie and Kate showed up that night and I was couched. I don't want to say much about the weekend because it was so incredibly frustrating, but let's just say I didn't get to ski. By New Year's Eve, it was starting to loosen up, but still no skiing. I went snowshoeing on New Year's day and it felt pretty good, but....

Jan 2: Josh was a good sport and was willing to go up LCC to see if I could tour. We decided to hit Flagstaff to check out Day's and Toledo and see what we could do. Disappointingly, I made it about halfway up Flag before my back started spasming. We de-skinned and had a few good turns back to the road. Not much, but at least I was improving.

Jan 5: My goal for last week was to ski on Sat. That's all I cared about. Massage, ice, heat, stretching, you name it. A big storm was lining up for Friday night, Sat day, and Sunday, so I didn't want to miss another good weekend. Sat morning, I did a long warm-up at home and we busted up to Solitude. I brought a book in case I had to sit in the lodge all afternoon. :) My back felt surprisingly good all morning, albeit a little unstable. The wind-buff was super fun and it started dumping snow around 10:00. By about 2:00 I was ready to go, and the snow was getting a little heavy, so we decided to save ourselves for Sunday.

Jan 6: I woke up praying that my back wouldn't be wrecked. I felt pretty good, and did another good warm-up at home. My met Chris at 8:45 and got in the first group up Eagle. We were a little disappointed as we dropped into Paradise that the overnight snow had not completely covered the heavy bumps from yesterday. We picked around for a few runs, meeting up with Robin and Joe, and playing phone tag with the rest of the Soli crew. Summit, Milk Run, and Parachute all opened sround 10AM, and it was mayhem all afternoon. We were the second group that dropped into Milk Run, and it was incredible. Next run we hit Parachute to get over to Summit - again, the coverage was awesome and the snow was incredible. As we got to the top of Summit, the Honeycomb gates opened, and we proceeded to take three laps of the best skiing of the day. Eventually, we made our way back to Summit and met up with Lis. After a run in Headwall forest (sick), we met a huge group for lunch (Jack, Lisa, Pat, Jake, John). After lunch, it was back up to Summit as it started puking snow again. We skied until 3:30, and did one more Vertigo run off Powderhorn. Untracked powder at 4:00 - can't beat it.