King of the Mountain!

Introducing the TC Ski Crew in the "King of the Mountain" Challenge...



Dedicated to SHT. Special thanks to Mother Nature for providing the powder.

(Note: Sorry for the quality, I had to reduce it so the site could handle it.)

Be Awesome Instead

Some days just plain suck.

You wake up excited and happy because you think it is Thursday, yet you are horribly wrong. It is in fact Tuesday. At work you feel every second of every slow and painful minute tick by as you try hopelessly to absorb yourself in your job. The office is almost stiffling and deafly quiet except for the clattering of keyboards and the clicking of mice. Which today oddly enough remind you of nails scratching on a chalkboard. All you want to do is go home, but it is not even lunchtime yet. Brutal.

As a recent victim of such a day, I have devised a strategy to help get through it if it ever happens again...

1. Drink lots of water. Hydration will keep you feeling refreshed and awake. It will also help you waste some time by having to frequent the bathroom. (Unintentional side affect - your coworkers may buy you some depends to help with your little "problem")

2. Print out documents from a printer down the hall or across the office. Although it is not the most efficient thing to do it will get you up and moving. Plus by leaving your desk you chance running into a collegue that you can chat up real quick. ("Hey, what awesome activities are you getting into this weekend." or "I hear you are into awesome things, you should check out this blog I've been reading." You know, stuff like that.)

3. Take a "smoke" break. Smoking is bad for you (and it is NOT awesome), but you got to hand it to those people for having an excuse to actually get out of the office for a few minutes every couple of hours to take a break. Seriously genius, minus all the negative health affects and grossness. Instead of going out for a cig, go out for 5 minutes for some fresh air. You will come back feeling like a new person.

4. If you are able, listen to music while you work. Some upbeat tunes could really turn your day around (don't be too embarrissed when you get caught dancing in your seat - been there). If you don't have an I-Pod or radio handy, Pandora is a sick website for streaming music (only go there if streaming media is not prohibited at your place of employment).

5. Send out an SOS e-mail to your coworkers that you are friendly with. They may have a few funny chain e-mail things up their sleeves that can provide you with a few minutes of enjoyment. Try to hide your laughter otherwise people might just think you have gone stir crazy...I did this and my inbox was seriously flooded with hilariousness.

6. Straighten up/reorganize your desk. (You may find the surface of your desk again. Be careful, it is not used to light!)

7. If all else fails, do as Barney Stinson would; "...be awesome instead. True story."

You Know You Are Awesome When...

You use the recent flu that is circulating around the office as your excuse to take the day off to go shredding. It is especially awesome when the forecast looks like this:

Hey, that's what PTO is for!

Eat, Drink, & Be Awesome

Leave it to the Irish to create a holiday that celebrates little people hording pots of gold at the ends of rainbows, weeds (aka shamrocks), excessive boozing, & the devouring of fatty pieces of brine soaked meat. Sweet.

In the spirit of the day, I thought it would be cool to share with you a few of my favorite things that are GREEN & AWESOME...

1. The Sporknife. Not just for camping, I use it everyday at work (...and sometimes when I run out of clean silverware at home, shhh).

2. Starbucks Recycled Tumbler. Although I don't drink coffee and am not a big fan of massive chains, I have to give it to Starbucks for making the best tumbler I have ever owned. It's durable, easy to drink out of, keeps my morning tea warm, its made out of recycled materials, and you get a free drink with purchase. Bravo Starbucks, bravo.

3. Green M&Ms. Oooh yeahhhh, we all know why.

4. REI's Traverse Daypack. With tons of sick features, it enables the user to be well equipped for any adventure.

5. Kermit the Frog. Self explanatory.

6. Oh yeah, and green beer, of course! Drink up.

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

How Not To Be Awesome

How NOT to be awesome. A wiki?! Come on! You have to be joking. Oh wait, the sad part is the author of this is 100% serious.

Note to reader (if by some miracle you are out there): Any instructions about being awesome that are entirely devoid of sarcasm clearly are the antithesis of all that is awesome. Fact.

Adventure Part 2

So the two "adventurers" hiked along the ridge, we strapped on our gear and started carving a sweet powder stash still naive to our tragic mistake. It was a steep, tree-filled line that was well worth the hike....until, BAM! I am close-lined by a bent over sapling, hidden under the snow. 

Face down, with one leg caught on the sapling up over my head, I start to panic. A searing pain shoots up from my ankle. CRAP.  A sense of calm washes over me as I hear SB charging back up through the deep snow to help me.   I do a one handed push up (which under normal circumstances I can hardly do a two handed girl push up, adrenaline is a powerful thing) and reach back to try to release my binding; only to fail miserably - stupid expert level DIM setting. I try once more and by an act of god the binding finally to releases, just as SB arrives.  Thankfully I am ok and he does not have to fashion a sled out of his snowboard to get me down to the bottom.  That and a helicopter rescue just wasn't in the budget for this month.

Crisis averted, SB & KP go back to shredding some serious powder.  So worth the nearly broken ankle.  All is awesome, until we run into some tele-skiers who so kindly inform us that we are in fact dumb-asses and are NOT in Ski Bowl and are actually quite a ways away (especially sans skins & tele bindings).  But not to worry, if we keep going down there is a big chance that we will run into either Mirror Lake or the highway at some point.  Nice.

I turn to SB and say, "well we better start enjoying the nature, or we are toast." (this is based on a prior discussion that occurred earlier in the day where an outdoor survival tv show talked about how most people who survive being lost in the woods took time to enjoy the wilderness..and by damn, we were going to survive. Yay nature!) After a bit more shredding and nature enjoying we successfully made it to Mirror Lake.  There we are informed by a group of snowshoers that the highway is another 2 miles down a narrow switch-back trail and that we could probably hitch hike back to the resort from the trailhead.

Halfway down the trail we run into a nice couple on their way back down.  They sympathize with our stupidity and offer us a ride in their pickup at the bottom. SCORE.  They tell us to just wait for them at the trailhead.  Ten minutes later we run into another group of snowshoers coming up the trail who ask us if we had a pickup parked down below....because, um, it's about to get towed.  Shoot, there goes our ride.  But alas, SB & KP are fighters. We decide to storm down the rest of the trail and try to rescue the car of the people rescuing us - no matter what.

As you can see from the celebratory picture above, we totally made it.  Followed shortly after (seriously, they hauled ass down the trail once they got word their car was about to get towed) by the awesome people with the pickup.  We save the car, hop in the back, and get dropped off right at the base of Ski Bowl, 5 feet from the lift.

Oh yeah, and the whole epic tale only lasted about 2 hours.  We had time to do another run before we were supposed to meet the rest of the TC ski crew for beers. What an adventure.

The End.

Intermission

Just a little slice of heaven...

Timberline @ Mt. Hood, Oregon

Windows 2 - Breckenridge, Colorado

Honeycomb Caynon - Solitude, Utah

Word of the Day: Adventure

"Adventure is my trigger word; once it has been uttered, there is no turning back." - SB

It was slightly past 8am when the TC ski crew assembled. The car was littered with skis, rockstar energy drinks, snow gear, and tired/hungover, yet happy passengers. It was setting up to be a perfect slope-side day; even though the crew had gotten a late start.

The destination was Mt. Hood, Oregon; home of Mt. Hood Meadows & the infamous Timberline (its lodge served as the setting for "The Shining") ski resorts. Unfortunately, the entire population of Portland must of woke up and thought to themselves, "hey, what a great day for shredding," because Meadows was at max capacity and closed down. Instead of heading another 30 minutes up and around the mountain to Timberline, the TC crew opted to hit up a more local & low key hill right near by. This is where the word "adventure" turned a normal ski day into an awesome tale.

Now, you see, when you hike up to an area and see a sign that says something along the lines of "Danger, you are going into backcountry full of avalanches, peril, and places where no one can hear you scream and no one will be able to save you unless you can afford to charter a helicopter," think twice before entering. Also, double check your map.

SB: "Yo, did you read that sign?"
KP: "Yeah, something about snow and things like that. Don't worry, that just means the terrian is sick over there!"
SB: "Do you think it leads out to a lift at the bottom?"
KP: "Well, there are a bunch of tracks headed this way and I think I see another skier over there, so it definitely must."
SB: "Are you sure?"
KP: "Come on, it will be an ADVENTURE."
SB: "Damn, that's it, we're going."


See the red circle and the arrow going outside of the ski area? That is where KP & SB decided was the best place to catch some sick powder. Clearly NOT in the ski area and clearly does NOT lead down to a lift.






But, they had not figured it out....yet. (To be continued)

Don't Try This At Home

Your daily dose of awesome:



T-Wolf conquers Vail's China Bowl. (As filmed by KP)