Turns All Year: Month 59

It’s hard to believe October will mark my 60th month – 5 years – of chasing snow every month. It’s not always glamorous, but it is always skiing, and a day skiing is better than a day doing anything else.

Theresa and I had very low expectations when we left Seattle at 6am on Sunday. Good thing, because poor T-Town was dragging from the plague, a sickness she got after completing the Crystal Mountain Marathon the weekend prior.

After 20 minutes in the Enumclaw Safeway, Theresa was finally ready to shuffle back to the car for the beautiful drive up HWY 410 to Paradise. It takes a bit longer, but avoiding South Hill in Puyallup is worth the price of 13 minutes to take the “backside” route. We pulled into the parking lot just before 9am. Theresa was immediately stung by a bee. In the ass. Because: of course.

Obligatory parking lot photo.

We just so happened to park next to Nikki, an Instafriend I was really excited to to finally adventure with. Along with her husband Corey, we set off and made it to Pebble Creek in about an hour. Another 400′ and we were ready to put on skins. Nikki was wearing incredible tights, and I enjoyed the view 😉

Nikki is a personal trainer. That fact will not surprise you when you check out those glutes!

After an hour of skinnig, we’d reach 8400′ and Theresa and I had had enough. It was beer:thirty, so we called it and said goodbye to our friends. We broke out the Rainier Beer.

I also broke out Rosie the Riveter. I was stoked to finally introduce Theresa to Rosie, and of course introduce Rosie to Rainier. She felt right at home.

Don’t mess with Rosie. She’s a Rainier expert now.

The ski down was better than expected – but remember our expectations were in the toilet. New snow fell in early September and white traces still remained, but the old, crusty, dirty, terrible snow was still better than the sticky new stuff. We made some good turns actually. Look, there was corn!

September corn.

Normally things are pretty anticlimactic on the way down. You came, you skied, and you just want to get the hell off zee mountain and get home to a shower and maybe another cold beer.

But the universe had other plans.

First we had to jump start my car. Someone left the lights on and the battery was completely dead (okay, it was me). Jumping seems simple enough, but when my jumper cables wouldn’t reach the other battery, we had to push my car out of the spot and block the entire drive-thru lane. It took a full 5-minutes to get the battery charged enough to start, then just getting out of the parking lot was a full on ‘government operation’.

Fall colors. No Filter.

Finally back on the road (we took 410 again), we encountered a rollover accident. How someone managed to flip their car sideways up against a tree on a two-lane, 45 mph road is a mystery to me.

THEN we got to Enumclaw and needed some cheese (for a girl’s night potluck post-skiing), and ALL of Enumclaw was out of power. The store had entire aisles closed off, and big plastic sheets over the cold-sections to keep them cold (presumably so they wouldn’t have to throw all the food away). NOT surprisingly, they still had enough power to accept our credit cards….

But that was it. We made it to our potluck. We drank wine and ate chili and ate cake and drank wine. Then I finally got a shower. I can’t imagine a better Sunday.