Saturday, May 23, 2009

Trip to Tinker AFB

I just got back from 11 days in Oklahoma City. I was sent to assist our site team at Tinker AFB get back on track. It definitely was a fun and eventful "work-cation." I had a tornado develop right over my hotel the first Wednesday there. Luckily I happened to be downtown with a coworker and the tornado ended up touching down 15 miles to the east of my hotel.

During the weekend I had the opportunity to visit the Oklahoma City Federal Building Memorial. It was a quiet, yet sobering experience.













Saturday, May 9, 2009

Winter Performance Review

So another winter come and gone. Today marked my end of winter; I took the ski cargo box off my car. Let's go ahead and look at my goal performance.

GOALS:
  1. Ski at least 45 days: 57 Days; 15 Backcountry
  2. Ski at least 800,000 vertical feet: 722,345 feet
  3. Ski the the south face/couloir of Ben Lomond from the peak w/Christian: No
  4. Ski Little Superior on a good powder day w/Christian: No
  5. Get Avalanche Level 1 Certification: COMPLETED
  6. Get Avalanche Level 2 Certification: COMPLETED
  7. Huck a certain cliff on Banana Dayz in Big Cottonwood Canyon: COMPLETED
  8. Huck a certain cliff on Honeycomb Cliffs in Big Cottonwood Canyon: COMPLETED
  9. Drop Corbet's Couloir at Jackson Hole: COMPLETED 3 times
  10. Learn a backflip: No
  11. Ski Silverton Mountain: COMPLETED, Got arrested on my birthday
  12. Ski Monte Cristo in Little Cottonwood Canyon: No
  13. Film one or two short ski mountaineering films w/Christian: No
  14. Call in sick to work at least once for a weekday storm dump of 15 inches+: COMPLETED
  15. Ascend all 3 pitches of Malan's Waterfall: No
  16. Solo Willard Peak ice drainage at least 3 times: No
  17. Take an ice climbing trip to Ouray, CO: COMPLETED
  18. Find a super hot Backcountry Babe to date: No
Ok so let's look into why I didn't accomplish some of these goals:
  • I didn't get my vertical footage goal due to my job as a ski buddy with Dakota. I never got him to ski more than 10,000 feet per day (more than 5 runs).
  • Any goal that I had with Christian became an extreme challenge due to Christian returning to school and having a baby.
  • I never did learn a backflip because I just forgot about the goal.
  • I never did get to ski Monte Cristo as I never got up to Superior this year. Montes Cristo is the true summit to Superior and it's easiest to do those two in the same trip.
  • After my ice climbing trip to Ouray, I focused more on skiing and I didn't have any luck with weather as it was a really warm winter causing the ice at lower elevations to not form up as usual.
  • And I didn't get that super hot backcountry babe to date cause I didn't really care for that goal. Maybe things will change this next year.
INJURIES:

So this year seemed to be the year of injuries for me. I couldn't believe how one injury would happen right after I healed from another one. Let's look at the damage I had:
  1. Torn meniscus left knee - Caught my inside ski on the top of a mogul
  2. Subluxed left shoulder - Cliff drop into really dense deep snow
  3. Split lip and chin - Hit a patch of ice at high speeds as I initiated a turn = wipeout
  4. Sprained right knee - Poor technique when exhausted on a bumped out technical run
  5. Hairline fracture right fibula - Bad cliff drop onto a mogul
  6. Sprained left thumb - Dakota ran into me while stopped and took out my legs
  7. Sprained right ankle - I have no idea what happened
  8. Broken ribs, 7th and 8th on left side - Carbon fiber ski pole to the ribs at high speed
Yeah I got a little beat up this year. Hopefully I will have better luck this next season. Plus I'm going to make sure that I workout during the season, do a lot of yoga, and stretching to stay healthy.

A really cool highlite of the winter was joining the Icelantic Ski Promotion Team. I love skiing so much and have really wanted to get involved in the industry. This has given me a taste of that and really doesn't seem like work at all. I enjoy working the demos and spreading the word about the skis. As long as I am not required to help out with demos on the really good snow days, I'll be good.