The post Snowboarding Around appeared first on Justin Silver.

I tried to leave Tahoe and get back to San Francisco, but after it took me 2 hours to get to and sit in Truckee, the road finally just shut down and I was stuck. It didn’t make sense to just hang out, and after I confirmed that Steve was headed up to Squaw that night, I backtracked to the house to spend the night.

I woke up relatively early and headed over to Squaw, and Steve was nice enough to provide a free lift ticket. Slow going in the Special Tickets line made me miss first chair, but I still managed to get out pretty early. The snow was a little beat up over Friday, but there was more on top and overall really good. We mostly stuck to Red Dog before dipping over and poaching Squaw Creek… and we weren’t the only ones. My video taking was pretty weak, and I was mostly just trying to get in as many laps as I could before I had to leave. These are a few of the Squaw Creek runs, with Red Dog Ridge at the end. The bus back from Squaw Creek had something like 25 people on it, and I want to say the capacity was 14. Overcrowded would be a good description, but again, it was worth it. I had to take off just after noon to head back to the City, but not bad to get another sweet powder day so late in the season.

The post Day 40: Squaw Valley appeared first on Justin Silver.

I got home on Monday night from Andy’s wedding in Atlanta, and was tracking what looked like it could be a decent storm, despite the fact that it was April 26th. Sure enough, the 6″ they were expecting turned into a foot, and then they got another foot and a half on top of that for 29″ total. I played around with some different camera mounts – on the nose of the board (I was on the Neversummer Summit 169, so the nose was way out there), on a trekking pole on the front of the board, on my pack, and hand held – all to varying degrees of success. I think this was my most successful video editing to date, I managed to get the action mostly synced to the music, and the jerky nature of it kinda fits with the banghra/hip hop. Threw a cartoon filter on it, and bam! it looks kind of like a video game.

The snow was great – light and fluffy, and even a little soft underneath – so Javier and I had a pretty good day overall. I tried to get home, but it was still dumping and 80 ended up getting closed in Truckee. It took me nearly 2 hours to get to there, so I just turned around and headed back to the house to get in one more day.

The post Day 39: Squaw Valley appeared first on Justin Silver.

Freshly back from my whirlwind (depending on how you look at it, there was quite a bit of driving involved) tour of the southwest, I got back to San Francisco just in time for the parents to get to town. After a few days in the city, we made the trek up to Tahoe so that Herb could get some skiing in, with me providing as much instruction as possible considering I don’t know how to ski. My hope was that I could at least convey some knowledge about how snow works, since that was one of the things that was hard for me to figure out when I was learning to snowboard. That makes sense if you consider the most snow I had ever seen in my life was the “blizzard” of 1993 when Atlanta got 6″. Now granted, that is a lot of snow for the South, but it’s still not the same as a 100″ base.

Herb got a little bit of a slow start, but after a few runs he was looking pretty good. I was able to practice riding fakie (and was reminded why learning to snowboard sucks every time I caught an edge), and over all it was a good day with perfect weather. The downside is that we neglected to put on sunscreen, so there was a little bit of burning, and the snow was so deep I hit the top of a metal fence (6ft? 8ft) and put what I assume to be a fatal gouge in the Malolo.

Even though there was a ton of snow on the ground, I felt like this could be my last day of real riding in Tahoe, so it was nice to get up there. We finished up, met Sally at the base of the Tram, then busted it back to the city to eat dinner with Reagan, Matt and Sara, which made for a nice finish to the day.

The post Day 38: Squaw Valley appeared first on Justin Silver.

Went to Squaw Valley with Jimmy and Adam, and for some reason we started out the day by hitting Silverado. The snow wasn’t all that great, and the result was mainly cramping. A few down Shirley Lake, and then we met up with Nichole and a few of her friends.

Overall the day itself wasn’t good snow wise, but we hung out at the Space Cowboys Snowfest party on the deck for a bit, had a few beers, and made the best of the day.

The post Day 29: Squaw Valley appeared first on Justin Silver.

The weather was super nice, and we all decided to go to Squaw, everyone being Roger, Josh, Nicole, Alegra and Carolina. Nicole and I started out with a few runs on Siberia Express before she met up with some friends and I set out to hike from Emigrant to the Mainline Pocket, which for some reason was completely untracked for the most part. As the day wore on, you had to go further down the ridge line, but even a couple turns made it worthwhile, and the view from the top was really nice.

After a stop to rehydrate, Nicole and I headed over to KT22 for a while, but my knee caused me to call it quits a little earlier than I would have liked, and everyone else was planning to leave at 3:00 anyway. On the way down, we ran into Carolina, which is impressive considering where we were (Red Dog Ridge) and how big the mountain is (large). A beer at Le Chamois, and then back to the house to relax. All in all a really fun day at Squaw.

The post Day 18: Squaw appeared first on Justin Silver.

Despite being ridiculously hung over (I swore off whiskey), Reagan and Carolina managed to get me out of bed and over to Squaw Valley at a reasonable hour – I think we were even on the mountain by 11am. I was expecting pretty bad conditions, considering that it hadn’t snowed since Wednesday, and it had been pretty warm during the day with freezing temps at night, but I was pleasantly surprised – conditions on piste were actually quite good, and you could get some decent speed. I almost got my pass pulled for going too fast down Shirley Lake, and while I was going at a good clip, there was no one around and the patroller generally seemed to have a bad opinion of snowboarders.

We wrapped up the day on Red Dog, then spent 30 mins trying to get a beer at Le Chamois (for some reason the bar tender was a super dick and wouldn’t give us beer, likely because we pointed out that we had been waiting for quite some time). We did finally get served, then went to the Auld Dubliner for dinner – surprising good – and watched the football game on TV, though I only slightly paid attention.

A pretty good day considering how it all got started.

The post Day 10: Squaw Valley appeared first on Justin Silver.