On the Friday after Thanksgiving, I headed up to Mt. Baker with AndyM and LorenzP. If I didn’t have people to go with, I don’t know that I could have crawled out of bed when my alarm went off at 4:30am. It’s about 3.5 hours from my house so I don’t get up there very often. However, they have the most open terrain in the area right now so that was our destination.
The forecast called for 1-2 feet of snow overnight on Thursday but that never really materialized. I was pleasantly surprised by the coverage of the runs though. I left my rock skis at home and wasn’t disappointed. We didn’t venture off the groomed runs very much though because there were still a lot of rocks, trees and stumps poking through the snow. It will take another 3-4 feet of snow to open up those areas.
We only did about 10,000 vertical feet (roughly half of a normal day for me) but my legs were burning at the end. I guess I haven’t used a lot of those muscles in a while. Thankfully nobody ended up with injuries on the first day of the season.
All in all I spent as much time on the road as I did on the hill, but it was still good to get out there and make some turns. It was also fun to ski with these guys for the first time. We all skied at roughly the same speed so hopefully we can team up again. With no wedding to plan this year, I’m looking forward to hitting the slopes a bit more than I did last year.