oregon trails

Our annual ski trip to Oregon was last week and as usual, we had a great time. I had the girls go to ski school for the first two days, which meant I had some time to ski with and attempt to keep up with my super-skiing nephews.

I don't know why we have such crazy luck but every February the snow at Mt. Bachelor seems perfect. We always seem to arrive just after a multi-day big storm, and that was the case again this year. It also snowed off and on every day we were there so every day brought several more inches of fresh powder. It was faaaaantastic!

I had my camera with me every day but it was so cold and windy on our first ski day that I didn't take any pictures, since working the camera means taking my gloves off. I couldn't stand the thought of that on saturday. But on sunday it was just ever so slightly warmer and the gloves came off every now and again. Tim and Andrew and I spent most of the day on the back side of the mountain, where there are the longest runs, deepest powder, and lots of trees to weave your way through, if you like that sort of thing. Which we do.

Tim:


Andrew:


The guys were constantly jumping too and I tried to get pictures of that, but the darned delay in focusing and taking the picture resulted in mostly nothing. Sometimes they were just a blurry, jumping flying skier going by me.

It was a great first couple of days.


On the third ski day the twins and John decided to stay at the ski house and play in the snow. Tim and Laura had to get back to college, and so Terri and Andrew and Erin and I went out and enjoyed the only clear day during our trip. Finally some real visibility and being able to appreciate the view from up there.




Erin skied well. She handles any intermediate run very well, but she is still cautious and doesn't ski very quickly.


She even did a couple of advanced runs with me. Here she is on one with large moguls:


A moment to get that ski back on and she finished it and asked to try it again:


Then on our last ski day the plan was for us to ski with all of the kids, but another storm was moving in and the wind was picking up and visibility was disappearing.



So we decided to head over to the west side of mountain where the lifts don't go as high and would probably be more sheltered and thus have milder conditions. Luckily, that's exactly what we found. It turns out that the lifts we had just taken were then closed because of the wind, but on the west side of the mountain we had fun skiing on some easier runs and on some side paths through some trees.




Though I didn't think it would be possible when we saw how bad the conditions were on the other side of the mountain, we actually skied until past 2:00 on our last day and had a lot of fun.