day 43. snowboarding. skiing. sunday river. 1/24.

kasmira actually rode the explorer in with me. the day got off to a weird start because there was this red sox thing going on and i wanted to get these vouchers to buy tickets they were passing out. i had originally read that it was going to be in barker so we headed there first. no sign of it but then we saw it started at 10 so i headed up to do the barker break. kasmira took runs on barker while i sat in the shack with sergio. we went back down and still no sign of the red sox road trip and then i discovered it was actually in south ridge. so, instead of just heading up locke from there i had to go back to south ridge. we got two vouchers and headed up south ridge to spruce. my schedule of breaks was a little messed up and i thought kelly would say something. she didn't. i was definitely a little sore and struggling with the lightning fast wax job on my board. at least the edges were razor sharp. the conditions were also so-so. better for skiing because it was scratchy in many places. kasmira took off from the top of spruce to jordan which i guess broke down after she took one run. she had a lesson at one. after going down american express i took quite a digger getting off the locke mountain lift which sucks for snowboarders as you have to ride it out really far before it levels out allowing you to stop easily. i tried to turn stepped out which i am not very good at and fell backwards. i dusted myself off and went into the shack. from there i went down upper sunday punch to cascades to the top of #9. after #9 it was the usual loop to #11 and #10. i had done a decent job of making up the lost time. since salvation sucked so bad yesterday i decided to head straight down obsession today. it was very icy so i i did a lot of scraping on my heal side edge which was shaving the top of the ice pretty good. i'd occasionally make a toe turn when the snow allowed but mostly just got down without worrying about style points. heat's off was almost as bad. cascades was a little bit of improvement but not much. i cut across to lower monday mourning where the race had recently ended so it wasn't all scraped off (it had been closed to the public) and ripped down the right side and kept enough speed to reach easy street and ride straight into south ridge. after doing my trail reports i went to pick up kasmira at her lesson. because of her ability, she had wound up with a private and the guy raved about her. said she was the best skier for her age he had ever seen, she was basically faster and better than he was and that he thinks she's got a real future ahead of her. he said he didn't really feel he could teach her anything she didn't know already about how she skis so they wound up working on some free-style stuff like skiing backwards and turning around while moving and doing actual 360s while moving. they had clearly had a great time. i grabbed my board and we went up south ridge so she could show me. she did great just skiing backward which i have seen her do before but she was much more fluid. she also went nuts doing multiple 360s and made it look effortless. i felt much better on the snow covered gentle terrain of south ridge and we skied and rode till they closed the lift. reminded of the sundays of old when kasmira and i would ski and ride till the lifts closed, minus the two hour drive home. we've come a long way, baby.