(This is very long - skip the story if you like and go straight to the slideshow)

Last year we headed out for the week between Christmas and New Years to chase snow and spend the week skiing. Having had a great time last year, and successfully finding more than one big snow day the plan was to try and repeat the effort this year. Last year the road trip team consisted of myself, DeAnn, Nancy and Cody.

DeAnn and I were in but Cody was out doing a bike trip and NAN! was out as she has a new home coming and thought she should get some work done at the office and save some money. The weather out west has also been very warm and the ski trip didn’t seem like it had much of a chance of success as there be no snow to chase, which would just make it a road trip for average skiing. I didn’t pressure her as I didn’t have great hopes that we could repeat the adventure of last year, which was going to be hard to beat.

Part of the deal with the New Years ski trip is that we make absolutely no plans until we convene as a group on the 27th, although we throw ideas around and look at forecasts before hand. With the trip looking like it was going to be only DeAnn and I, and DeAnn suffering from delusional night driving the possible locations were going to be a bit closer than if we had a full set of night and day drivers. I figured I could do the night shift and she could take the day shifts while I slept.. and I would rather have 3 good days of skiing with 2 long days of driving than 5 days of ‘okay’ skiing.

I knew that Colorado was having an epic year, but that is 20 hours from Calgary, so I thought Utah was a good second bet and they appeared to have a good base and snow storms in the coming week. This leads me to to one of the predicaments of chasing snow on a road trip, the goal is basically to expose yourself to the worse possible driving conditions possible as that is where the snow will be the best. Paul had mentioned Jackson Hole as a great ski location so I checked it out and it appeared to be having a good year and a miserable weather forecast for the coming week. I proposed Jackson Hole, Wyoming to DeAnn and she was in - from my quick google maps calculation it would be about a 12-13 hour drive in good driving conditions. DeAnn being the awesome teammate that she is thought it was a good idea, with none of the back ground information at all… she just trusted me (dangerous).

I firmed up the idea to her on my cell phone as I was driving from Lloydminster to Calgary while NAN! was in the car with me when suddenly I seen cracks in the foundation…. NAN! was quite interested in this trip but there were some catches. For those that know me reasonable well it was all I could do to not jump on the opportunity and put the full court press to get her to come. Having NAN! on the trip would be AWESOME! Being patient we slowly worked through the logistics and a few hours later NAN! was in. SWEET!

We arrived in Calgary a bit later than expected, 6:30 pm, while DeAnn ran some errands in town for me such as picking up my skis which would be a key piece of equipment to have for this trip. DeAnn was also nice and patient as she waited all day for us to arrive, basically wasting a good driving day and forcing a night trip - this was pretty unavoidable as I feel like I cut the family time short already on the holidays and leaving earlier than the 27th wouldn’t be fair… but she understood that. We decided to take the ‘mountain’ Camry on the trip as it was good on fuel, bigger than DeAnn’s car and the seats in the back folded down making room for the gear. Who needs an SUV when you have a mountain Camry… winter roads, summer tires here we come!

NAN! and I did a quick turn around in Calgary, packed our stuff for the trip and got DeAnn and headed out of town. It was exactly 2 hours from entering Calgary to us leaving again. The goal was to drive through the night and arrive in Jackson Hole (not that we knew exactly where it was, were we would stay, what the roads might be like, etc.)

DeAnn and I sporting some Tim’s getting ready for the drive:

NAN looking ready to skip sleeping in a bed for a road trip in the Camry:

NAN! and I would split the night up into shifts, one would drive while the other slept. NAN! took the first shift, which was really an hour or so outside of town before I would give up the reigns of the Camry, but at the start of the trip no-one is going to sleep as you are just too damn excited. NAN! drove till about 2 am which left me with the shift that seems to be my sweet spot on these trip - 2 am till the morning. The roads were in great shape to start we encountered some less good roads in southern Montana and then over the pass into Idaho Falls we had a basic white out but with the lack of traffic on the roads at 5 am and the interstate highways in the USA being super wide made it not a bad or scary situation at all (easy for me to say I was driving; I’ll let the girls tell their own story).

When we got to Idaho Falls we stopped at a gas station for some directions to the ski hill, which they didn’t really know but they pointed us to the right highway and we were off. We had been on the road now for 1100 kilometers since leaving Calgary and were somewhat tired but we could taste it…. except that it was brown everywhere . (NOTE: NAN! and I had already driven 550 km before arriving in Calgary so we were at almost 1800 km so far.)

On the way to Jackson we went over a pass that lifted our spirits and tested the girls patience’s with my driving as it was once again poor driving conditions and the roads were not good.. but I sensed that if we persevered that we might be able to get a day of skiing in - I didn’t yet share these plans with the girls; the timing wasn’t right during our little mountain drive on icy, snowy roads. As we descended down from the pass we once again had brown fields everywhere, this was quite discouraging.

The last pass before we descend down into Jackson:

On the final stretch on the way to the hill we talked about what to do if the skiing sucked, where we would go and when, and if we were going to ski that day. Everyone reacts to driving through the night, being sleep deprived and complete unknowns in different ways; our group was pretty quiet (and hungry) with me being ‘a bit’ too excited about getting out to go skiing, maybe even a bit annoying. Once arriving the snow looked okay, not great but okay and the hill appeared to have good coverage. We checked the cost of lift tickets - $73 USD!!!! OUCH! We next inquired about lodging, staying at the hill it was going to cost $210 per night, but we could stay in Jackson for $55 per night.. now were talking. We decided to try the hill out and then stay in Jackson that night and play it by ear from there… at this point the ladies are scared of me I think as they feared another car ride further south into Utah.

DeAnn and I headed out to check out the hill while NAN! was going to spend the next hour or so getting her snowboard ready to go. You see, because NAN! had not planned on going on the trip she didn’t have her board at home, it was getting tuned at the shop. She did have her Coor’s Light board that she won at a bar but had never ridden, which meant she had some work to do on the bindings and such - she would also go wax-less for the trip.

My first impression of the hill was that it was big and natural enough that if I didn’t take some of the limited sign-age seriously I might find myself hucking off some cliff by accident (DeAnn and Nancy are smarter than I am so they were at less risk). Jackson Hole has the fairly famous Tram line that takes you from the bottom to the very top of the mountain, DeAnn and I figured that would be a great way to start to the trip so we queued up. We were able to find good snow up top and enjoyed the Tram ride. I was impressed with the amount of terrain that the mountain seemed to have and it look like a steep hill with good skiing.

No sleep; but excited to get up for a day of skiing:

This is the last year of the Tram; we just got lucky catching it this year as the hill will most certainly be different with out it:

Good snow found on day 1 (I’m a bit forward on my skis… I did manage to land it - or so the fish story goes):

We caught up with NAN! at the end of the day, she was also quite happy with her day on the hill. The biggest problem we currently had was that it was pouring rain at the bottom of the hill. The top was great but this rain would destroy the bottom of the hill and that was not going to work for me.

We headed into town, got one night at the Virginian (cheapest place in town apparently) and then went out to get some food. My deal with the girls was that I would get out of bed at 5 am and if there was more than a couple inches of snow on the car we would stay and ski Jackson Hole for at least one more day, if the car was wet we were getting up and driving to Utah where we were looking for some dryer but equally precipitous conditions. So with it pouring rain outside we went to bed fairly early as we had basically not slept in 2 days, skied a full day at a big mountain and drove 1900+ kilometers for NAN! and I and 1300+ for DeAnn. We all went to bed with fear of the car being wet in the morning and being back on the road at an hour that was much too early.

Jackson has more dead stuffed animals than anywhere I have ever been… the Virginian had 21 in its lobby.. here are a few of them:

I dragged myself from under the covers at 5 am feeling awful and not really wanting to look outside but rather close my eyes and hope for the best and get up a couple hours later…. but that wasn’t going to happen. I rolled out of bed; took a deep breath and poked my head out the curtains. SNOW!!! there was SNOW!!… SWEET, now back to sleep for a couple hours.

We got up around 8 am and the ladies were happy to hear there was snow on the car and in fact by 8 am there was 6 inches of the white stuff. We had an amazing ski day and decided that now we would stay for the entire trip in Jackson which looked like a interesting town and it would be nice to be in one place for a week. The forecast for the rest of the week was snow, all was well.

There isn’t much to say except that in 4 days the top of the hill received 47 inches of snow (about 4 feet). Snow chasing doesn’t get any better than this.

NAN! enjoying the snow:

DeAnn wishing she was back at the office:

Enjoying some great turns:

The snow throughout the trip was heavy at the bottom of the hill, it could feel like cement and reasonably light up top -there was generally wet snow or rain at the bottom and thick heavy snow at the top of the hill throughout the trip…. but certainly nothing to complain about. You do notice that 4 days of skiing in deep snow when you are a bit out of shape creates some tired legs but it is amazing what 1 foot of fresh snow can do for finding just a little more energy for one more run.

We spent New Years at a place called the Cowboy bar, I was tired and work had put in me in a way less good mood (read: awful) so I was a party poorer. While we did go out and were out at New Years it was pretty tame.. of course that day I got the ladies up early to get to the hill 1 hour and 15 minutes before it opened - you can read the details below.

New Years eve brought more rain, but lots of snow to the top of the mountain… knowing that we had a long drive ahead of us and being quite tired from 4 long days of skiing we decided to sleep in, get a good breakfast and start the commute back home….. we knew that with the weather it could be a long drive and getting started sooner would work well as we had a couple passes that would be nice go over in the day light. Being late to town wasn’t going to work either I had a flight that I needed to catch and DeAnn and Nancy needed to work the following day.

Poke fun at Marcos story 1:
We got on the road fairly early and I needed to make sure that was in an area with cell reception by 11 am (I think that was the time) for a conference call to deal with the issues that made my new years less fun… the problem when ‘vacationing’ with me is that I always am doing a little bit of work on the side, but the girls are used to (or me). We stopped for breakfast at a little bakery and then got on the road… the problem was that we were running a few minutes late, not bad but I needed to be in this call so I increased the velocity of the Camry to 80 miles an hour which was working well and I was going to be in solid cell reception in time for the call in 5 minutes… until we passed my little friend:

I had to be sneaky so excuse the poor framing of this shot.. it was taken with my small camera as well.. figured he didn’t want to see my SLR sitting on the dash

I wasn’t sure what the damage or repercussions would be but I wasn’t looking forward to what Mr. Police Officer was going to be coming back with… I figured at 20 miles over the speed limit, it might be enough for him to take the my license away - either way I wasn’t looking forward to it. So I took a pic and called into the office letting them know that I would be late. When our friend the police office came back, he let me know that he was going to give me a warning…. A WARNING! I am clearly running out of luck as those who are long time patient readers will know that I also got off the hook when going up to the the Skyline trail with NAN!. My hint to getting out of a ticket - be really really polite and hope for the best.

[Okay I know this is long so if your still reading I’ll try make this interesting]
Poke fun at Marcos story 2:

So DeAnn and I, after waiting in the Tram line for about 40 minutes, we got to the top and decided to try out the Hobart shoots. It was getting later in the day but we thought we might still find some good snow on the left shoulder as most folks head right leaving that shoulder mostly untouched. As we skied down we were tired enough that taking pictures seemed like a great idea as it slows the pace and the snow was so soft that you could huck most drops and not worry about hurting yourself. Knowing this I stopped and encouraged DeAnn to take a jump for me and I could get a couple photo’s off. We had the big camera with us so getting good shots was possible and I really wanted a photo of her taking a jump.

At this point DeAnn let me know that she would pass and while everything looked really soft she preferred that someone had gone over the jump first so she knew what was there. I tried a couple more times to convince her but she was clearly uncomfortable and I didn’t want to be too annoying. I sent DeAnn down with the camera and let her know which ‘lip’ I had planned to go over. As DeAnn rightly pointed out, there wasn’t a lot we knew about what I was about to go over as it as all covered with nice soft snow but I had been going off these all week and this one looked as good as any.

Once DeAnn was set up I headed down and decided to go for the gusto as it was going to be on film, as I approached the lip everything seemed good… until I got right to the end of the lip, which was really a small wall that the snow had hidden from me - SHIT! I came off the lip WAY too far back on my skis and was not going to land this but I wasn’t worried as there was a couple feet of snow below me that would make this a soft landing. The other thought that was in my mind was to ensure I knew where my skies ended up as there was a large chance that one of them might pop off. Either way in the air I was comfortable if not mostly out of control… it is also amazing how much you can think about as you flail through the air.

My landing was not quite as expected - you see as DeAnn rightly pointed out - sometimes it is nice to know what you are going over and where you are going to land…. Well I landed on what wasn’t more than 1 foot of snow on top of rock - not a point rock, thank goodness. This landing popped off both of my skis, which I was quickly able to grab with my hands as they were ready this. The landing also after getting over the initial shock.. winded me and hurt a little bit… Women are simply wiser than men.

Not looking very pretty at all:

OUCH!, that hurt (the dark rock looking thing 8 feet above me is where my ass landed):

Okay fine - I’ll laugh at myself - I deserve it (and I’m okay, just a wuss)

Why DeAnn and NAN! are great teammates:

I can sometimes be a bit intense, and going on a ski trip with me when it is puking snow can increase my intensity (read: annoying-ness) by quite a bit. After 3 days of skiing and getting to the hill a bit later than say first lift - I asked the ladies if they would humor me and wait for an hour in a lift line on our 4th day of skiing when our legs were already going to be crying by lunch and a day that is also known as new years eve. The agreed to humor me and we arose quite early and were at the hill by 7:45; before they were even selling lift tickets and were waiting in line for the gondola by 8am - SWEET! Sure at 8am it felt sweet but the snow was on the brink of rain and after 60 minutes of waiting outside we were soaked to the core and it was going to be quite cold up top… I was loving life.

Getting ready at the car at the hill - I’m sure it wasn’t really that dark out:

NAN! and DeAnn waiting patiently for the life to open:

Me waiting… Nice eyes… not tired at all:

The snow was amazing, and we got several untracked runs… it was all worth it..

… and I will take this time to formally thank the girls for putting up with me and warn others if they think these trips look like fun.. they might be but I can be a pain in the ass .

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The 3 Amigos:

I can officially declare that we achieved another successful New Years ski trip with almost 4 feet of new snow in 4 days.

The same trip is penciled in for next year and I’m looking forward to seeing where it will take us and who might be on the trip next year….

Good looking Montana landscape: