2011-01-09 Grant Grove

Today Steven and I went skiing for the first time this season. You could tell we were out of practice we each fell at least four times in the two hours of skiing.Not too good, but could be worse. As Steven said, David is going to kill us off when we go out in March.

In Fresno, it has been gray and dwery for the past week, since it stopped raining. This is a normal January condition. But the good part is when it is gray like this, it is sunny up on the mountains. So when Steven and I broke through the 5500' barrier, sunshine greeted us. We were going to ski the south boundary road. But then we looked at Sunset Campground--which was covered by 4' of snow--and decided to ski the campground.

There was snowshoe tracks, but not ski tracks. So we wandered around. At the west edge of the campground, there is a view of the valley and of Lake Sequoia. This was good. We ski'd around and enjoyed ourselves, even the falls.

That is until we went up one slope and Steven stuck his pole handle deep. When he did this, the basket broke through the snow pack and got caught. We spent about 20 minutes getting out the pole-bent-but not the basket. This crippled Steven. So we went back to the car. In the process of getting the pole loose, the other pole also bent and lost its basket. I gave Steven one of my poles and we went back to the car.

Made it back around 5pm after traveling about 2 1/2 miles. Enjoyed the day, but the pole incident put a damper on the ending.

But the best scenery part was on the road back. As we were going back, the sun was setting. We got close to level with the top of the clouds. It was like you were on a plane, about to descend.