Since October we’ve gone backcountry skiing almost every weekend but we finally decided we take our teles to a resort this weekend. We planned the trip for a while, watching the weather to make sure we had great snow. Mostly we wanted a powder day in the middle of a storm. My husband made me get up at 5am - I told him he was crazy but I decided to do it anyway. So we drug ourselves out of bed and made it to Tahoe City by 7:15am where we had a coffee at the Dam Cafe served by a lady with lots of tatoos who looked like she just had gotten up. Nevertheless the coffee was great and the place was very homey.
We decided to start skiing as soon as the lift would opene at 8am and we pulled into Homewood at 7:45am amazed that we’ve arrived on time. We were even more amazed when we realized that we’ve arrived an hour and fifteen minutes early, having figured that every resort opened at 8am (based on pure conjection).
We got up on the hill with our teles thinking we could probably log more miles of downhill this one day at Homewood than the whole rest of the season backcountry. As soon as we got off the top of the lift onto the grommed runs, we knew that we were out of our element. We only knew how to ski on powder! So of course first thing we did was to head for the treed areas between the runs where we found 1 inch of powder on a breakthrough layer of windpacked powder followed by another 6 inches of old powder and all tracked up amid dense trees. Basically, we couldn’t even turn our skies. So when we finally realized that, we decided we’d get used to the runs. And we had a killer day!!! My husband said he had a breakthrough with this tele turns; however, the closest thing I had to a breakthrough was when my husband hit me on the chin with the grip of his pole as we were getting on the chair, sending my head into the middle crossmember on top of the chair, and almost caused my brains to break through my cranium!
Homewood was very enjoyable with a variety of trails and lake views from almost every place in the mountain. Although we didn’t find the powder we had hope for we did find the snow storm which blew in around 2pm. All and all it was a great day!

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 19th, 2005 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Skiing/Snowboarding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.