Windblown

 While Saturday was a spectacular ski day of sunny skies, low wind and deep powder, Sunday was awe inspiring for its wind and blowing snow.  Mother Nature has some teeth.  When we started our climb up the mountain it actually was not all that bad.  Sure it was windy, but nothing worse than we have experienced before.  

It got SUPER windy suddenly just when we were turning around to ski back down.  So windy that there was a ground blizzard and you could barely see the horizon.  We huddled up in the lee of a small spruce tree and took off our climbing skins and got ready to ski down.  The lee of the tree was a little oasis of shelter.  We saw some snowboarders coming down from higher up on the mountain and they joined us in our oasis.  One of the snowboarders took her snowboard off and put it on her pack so that she could walk down.  It was that bad.

Stuey got the one pair of snow goggles and then down we went.  It was blowing up hill and blowing so hard that it was hard to move downhill.  And I had to keep my hand over my eyes.  It was like skiing blind and I understood why the snowboarder decided to walk down.

But by moving in between the worst of the blinding blown snow squalls and heading across the slope over into the lee of some other trees we made it down to the less windy sections of the mountain.  Phweeeew.  We had had our Mount Everest experience!  And I did not even take any photos when the blowing snow was at its worst - I was afraid the snow would blow inside of the camera and wreak it.

Funnily enough after we got back to the car and were driving home the kids told me that they had had a great time.  'That was fun', they declared.  And it was fun in a very different way than Saturday had been fun.  We got to see Mother Nature's Teeth.

Patrick