Pow Pow City

Ocean's 11 isn't too bad. It's overly talky, as most Soderburgh films are, however, it's excellently paced and pretty well acted. But I'm not here to talk about decade old movies playing on HBO at 1:30 on a weekday afternoon.

Mammoth Mountain was the place to be this past weekend as the Roxy Chicken Jam descended on Northern California! Ria and I left Friday morning and had a very uneventful drive. The weather was beautiful the whole way up after they got 24" of snow the day before. But they'd done a great job of clearing the roads, so we found it curious that chains were required for the last couple of miles. I have video of our reaction, but I don't like my voice in it. Is that really how I sound? Kinda Travis Pestrana-ish? Ugh. Maybe that's why I'm into writing now. Anyway, we were annoyed. We decided to take them off when we stopped at the leasing office. Rebels! 


After settling in, we took the shuttle up to Main Lodge for an apres ski event, which for us was apres drive. I've been in town less than an hour, and I'm already getting free beer. My mood was buoyant. We even made a flip book!

After dinner and a few more drinks, we decided to call it a night knowing that we wanted to make an early start in the morning. We woke to our housemates who'd arrived over night and to snow that wouldn't stop falling all day. 


I don't have pictures or video, but imagine the funnest glade runs possible, add some more snow, subtract the Eskimo women draped in Caribou skins, and that's what it was like. Visibility was poor on most of the open runs, especially right off the chairs. In fact the top wasn't even open, so it wasn't a perfect day. The peeps who stayed for Sunday and Monday and hell, the rest of the week got that. (Miss Crunk can show you how much snow there was.) But the tree runs on the lower half of the mountain off Chair 8 were really really good. If I'm only going to get one day in this season, which appears to be the case, that was a great day to have.
 
Ok, time to wrap up. I know reading about someone else's good time can be annoying. That night, one of our group, I won't say who, but their company had an event in town, "made a commitment to party" and by the end of the night, I was faded, just water skiing in her wake. We were very very tempted to ride on Sunday, but the pain of leaving powder behind was tempered somewhat by our discovery of Dick's Smoke Wagon in Big Pine. Just outstanding. Next season there will be multiple Mammoth invasions.