As the initial intensity of launching wore off, we took off last weekend to make a trip up to Tahoe for some R+R. Amir and Justin stayed in San Francisco to man the fort while Pat, Pat’s girlfriend and I made the 4-hour drive north-west up into the Sierra Nevada.
We arrived at 2am and went straight to bed, ready for some eXtreme wintersports action the next day. There were seven of us up there in total – friends of Pat’s.
I’m sorry to disappoint certain members of my family, but I chose to ski rather than snowboard because:
- The generally accepted wisdom is that snowboarders are more likely to break wrists while skiers are more likely to break legs.
- I’ve more experience skiing (half day on Rossendale dry ski slope versus none for snowboarding)
- I was really looking forward to rocking the 80s neon shell suit look
After hiring some kit we headed up to Squaw Valley in the blazing sunshine. To ease myself in I went down the bunny slope a couple of times, while Pat went round in circles and laughed, then he headed off to do his own thing. My rule of thumb was that as soon as I managed to get down a certain slope without falling, I was ready for a more tricky one. So! After successfully wobbling down the easiest green slope, I took a bigger lift to try an intermediate “Easy Street” blue run instead.
Unfortunately, my uncanny sense of direction deserted me once again and I accidentally headed off down the double black diamond “Exhibition” instead, which was basically a light smattering of ice, on a cliff. Of course, once you’ve started, you can’t really go back, so I tried to ski down but basically spent most of my time either cartwheeling down or scraping snow out of my long johns.
It was only at the bottom that I realised I’d come the wrong way, and felt a bit less of a duffer.
The blue run I was actually looking for turned out to be not so bad, although on one of my last runs I happened to snag my ski pole in the ground and the end went KABLAM into my chops. I left an intermittent red trail down the mountain and had a really impressive looking big black bruise on my tongue for a few days.
The second day we went to Alpine Valley instead, which had some smaller, twisting runs. By the end of the day I was at a level where I spent sufficiently little time picking myself up and dusting myself off to make it loads of fun.
I drove us back down that Sunday evening, and we’ve been cracking on with work since. Scaling the service is still an issue – we’ve commissioned a new server to handle the load as a short term fix, although we’re going to have to get a lot cleverer about how we index all this information longer term… A month left till we have to demo what we’ve done and hopefully get some more funding!
