First Snow Day!

So, first off, Happy New Year! Hope every had fun and safe celebrations!

With the new year came yet another long weekend for me, so I decided to take advantage of it! (At least for one day anyway) Saturday night I headed up to Philly to crash with a friend from school, and then Sunday morning we made the drive up to Blue Mountain, PA. I had been to this mountain a few times while still in school and remember having a lot of fun there, so that's where we headed. As I mentioned in a previous post, conditions in this region of the east coast generally are not spectacular. We were on the snow by 8:30am and it was still pretty chilly out, and there was some definite ice on the ground. But once the sun came up and over the mountain, it softened things up quite a bit, and actually made for some pretty decent conditions! As an added bonus the mountain was darn near empty! No waiting in lift lines at all, and traffic going down the runs was minimal.

I didn't go too crazy yesterday. First day back on the snow since March, getting the feel for a brand new board and bindings, I more or less used the day to get my legs back under me again and get them warmed up. This coming Sunday I'm headed up to Killington, VT for a few days, so I also didn't want to walk away yesterday with some bozo injury that might ruin my upcoming trip! I spent a lot of my time yesterday practicing riding 'switch'.

Let me explain: When I ride regularly, my left foot is in front heading down the mountain, this is called 'regular' stance. If you ride normally with your right foot in front going down, it's called 'goofy' stance. Switch for me then, would be my right foot in front, essentially riding backwards down the mountain. I don't know how many of you snowboard, but this is a pretty darn tricky thing to learn. I'm not the greatest by any means, but I was starting to feel quite comfortable by the end of the day, and even made it down a few runs riding entirely switch. I was happy.

Enough about that. Here's a video I took towards the end of the day riding down a green run filming my friend I went with. I pan the camera towards my feet a few times to illustrate riding in both directions. As yes, I did fall once.