Tahoe - Part 2

Our third ski day at Lake Tahoe took us to Alpine Meadows. We were able to find some good snow in some of the high alpine bowls here.  Scott, Jason, and Dave even did a little hike to Beaver Bowl (not Idiot's Delight...yes, it's an actual name of a run).  Here they are looking very accomplished.

Later in the afternoon, we all enjoyed skiing the sunny parts of the mountain. (Sunny=soft snow) We had a great time skiing with Jason, Kaitlyn, and Dave.

I'll take the time here to mention that we were very lucky to be able to stay at Kaitlyn's family home near Donner Lake.  Kaitlyn is a Reno/Tahoe area native, and it's always fun to visit where your friends come from. A big thank you to her and Jason for hosting us and for a great time in general!  We enjoyed lots of euchre, a game called Coup, and hot tubbing.

On our last day, we got to visit the local Reno mountain, Mt. Rose. We chose this for two reasons: 1) We heard they had the best snow in Tahoe. 2) It happened to be LADIES DAY! So Kaitlyn and I got $30 lift tickets. Awesome.  Mt. Rose has a great local vibe, which was nice after visiting so many "resorts."

We had a great time skiing all over Mt. Rose.    We let the boys do the chutes, though. :)

While conditions in Tahoe weren't perfect, we had a really great time!  On to Colorado!

Tahoe - Part 1

Oh my, we've been skiing so much that we got way behind (again)!  We are, in fact, still on our Ski Road Trip enjoying where it has taken us so far.  Last week, we got to ski in Lake Tahoe!

Tahoe was pretty cool for us because we got to ski with our friends Jason and Kaitlyn plus Scott's dad, Dave, sister Kate and friend Kate also joined us for a couple days. We were excited to get to spend time with family and friends!

Our first day was at Squaw, arguably the most iconic mountain of the region.  Tahoe has been hurting for snow this year (and for a few years), but one of the perks is that all of our days were bluebird and warm.  We had a good time at Squaw but were definitely mixed on the "Squallywood" attitude.  We also gave our skis unintentional stone grinds on an adventure run... eh.

On our second day, we took the drive down to South Lake Tahoe to ski at Kirkwood. Again, another beautiful bluebird day.

It was a warm day at Kirkwood, but the snow was nice and soft and we got to enjoy some "beach" time for lunch.  What's a beach day without sharing a tall boy?

We lapped the Sunrise chair most of the morning and and early afternoon... why go anywhere else when the snow is good?  Eventually we did and Scott and Dave even managed to find some winter snow on the "The Wall".  Kirkwood had lots of filled in gully's(sort of forming natural half-pipes) that Scott also enjoyed skiing.

Lake Tahoe is a truly beautiful place, and we enjoyed taking in all the scenery as we drove back to the Truckee area along the lake.  One particularly stunning place is called Emerald Bay, and we happened to nail the timing right at sunset.

Lots of sunshine, great skiing, and great people!  Tahoe was shaping up to be pretty memorable. More to come!

Mt. Bachelor and Bend

Mt. Bachelor and the city of Bend was our second Oregon ski stop.  Bachelor is a volcano topping out just over 9,000 feet and there is a chair that goes essentially all the way to the summit.  Skiing lift-served laps off the top of a volcano is a very unique experience.  I've hiked a few volcanoes in the Northwest and it almost felt like cheating to ride a chairlift to the top.  Glorious, glorious cheating.

On our first ski day the Summit Chair opened for the first time after the storm that we had caught at Mt. Hood.  That meant another powder surge for us!  Here's the view after a short hike to the summit top.

If you're a skier, you're probably drooling at this photo.

And this one, looking back at the top.

We had lunch and reviewed where we've been.  Since you can literally ski any direction off the top, the resort is huge and sort of intimidating.  Getting lost?  Yeah, that'll happen.

The top gets tons of wind so in places the skiing was awesome, in places it was horrifying.  I had found that the East side the mountain was holding great snow and we skied it together after lunch.

We had just finished skiing from the top waaaaaaay in the distance in this photo.

Can you feel the leg burn yet?

Our second day in Bend was a rest day and after three days of hard skiing, we NEEDED it.  We went wine tasting and eventually out to a local brewery called 10 Barrel.  Bend is know for its breweries and it didn't disappoint.

We enjoyed another great skiing day at Bachelor with more summit laps and believe-it-or-not the discovery of packed powder on the Northwest and Outback chair we had neglected the first day.  Here's a view off the West side with the "Sisters" in the distance.

Bachelor/Bend was a really great stop and we hope to be back if we land in the Northwest.  We left town excited to catch up with Jason and Kaitlyn and family in Tahoe!

Mt Hood Shreadows

After a very stormy day at Timberline, we were really excited to score a powder day at Mt. Hood Meadows.  I skied a couple of hard hot laps before Shannon and I headed up together to explore.  The views of Mt. Hood were just glorious... how often do you get a bluebird powder day in the PNW?  This was maybe my second in 5 years.

Excited!  So very excited!

We cruised around and had some great laps before a buzz came around the Cascade Express chair (the high alpine chair).  We looked, watched the lifty's body language and decided it was time to get in line.  We waited maybe five minutes before they started loading and we had glorious untracked turns in the Mt. Hood alpine.  So good!  All in all, it was a great day with many scenes like below:

Shannon shredding

With such a low snow season in most of the PNW, our timing for Mt. Hood couldn't have been better!  On to Mt. Bachelor!

Anniversary and Ski Road Trip Begins!

After a great two-week recovery (ish) in Seattle, Scott and I were ready to hit the open road again.  This time to begin our two month Ski Road Trip.  We will be headed to various ski resorts throughout the west, hoping for powder and maybe some sunshine.

It just worked out that we began this road trip on our anniversary. (February 8th)  I think if you asked either of us on our wedding day what we thought we'd be doing in one year, we would not have said "returning from a five month international trip and headed out on ski road trip..and oh yeah, we don't have a job or a home".  But, that's where we are and, it's a pretty good place to be right now. :)  After some last minute Seattle errands, we headed south for Mt. Hood (Oregon).

Oh yeah, included in our Seattle time was buying a new car. After much debate, we finally settled on the Nissan Rogue. We're pretty excited about it!

We later added a roof box for skis!

We headed toward Government Camp, OR where we had a lovely dinner at the Timberline Lodge. (If you can't stay there, eat there, right?)  The food was great and we even got a free champagne toast from our waiter since he found out we were celebrating our anniversary.

Scott enjoying his lamb at Timberline. 

We also (and this took a LOT of effort) kept the time honored tradition of eating your wedding cake on the one year anniversary.  Special thanks to the Lehmans and Libby for keeping our cake frozen at various times while we were abroad. :)  The cake was still surprisingly tasty!

I hope it tasted this good at the wedding!

The next day was shaping up to maybe bring us some snow at Mt. Hood (instead of rain, rain, rain). We opted for the sleeping-in/watching the web cams until it turns to snow method.  This turned out pretty great.  We got up to Timberline around 1pm, and it had already been snowing for a while!

For those of you who don't keep up with the skiing world, the Northwest has had a pretty horrendous snow year.  We were so excited to finally ski some fresh powder (ok...Northwest powder, but still)! We found some great untracked areas, one of the perks of weekday skiing.

Woooo!

As mentioned before, this was Northwest powder, and so we ended the day a wet mess. My hair was basically a giant snowball and Scott looked like this:

This guy loves it!

All in all, we had a great first day skiing and crossed our fingers for more snow overnight!

Back in Seattle!!!

After a great stay in South America, it was time to return to the U.S. of A and reunite with friends in Seattle before taking off on our skiing road trip.

We arrived on a rainy, foggy Wednesday night which was pretty fitting for a return to Seattle in February.  You may think we really missed American food... but the truth is, we really missed handfuls of international food we didn't get abroad, specifically Asian food since we never went to Asia (besides technically Dubai).  So we started with some Vietnamese Pho with Taylor and Bozeman before crashing from travel.

The next day began our mountain vehicle search... which would actually take many days of our Seattle time.

After a day of car shopping, it was time to get to Powder Technician duty at Stevens Pass.  We enjoyed the skiing, but could definitely tell that Stevens was hurting for snow.  Still, it felt good to be sliding.

On Saturday, I (Scott) made it up skiing again with the fellas (Taylor, Bozeman, and Jason) while Shannon went to Kaitlyn's (Jason's fiance) bachelorette party.  Below is a photo of the guys skiing.  I'm told there are no photos from the bachelorette... which is probably a good thing?

Did I mention we missed Asian food?  Out we went again for sushi...

And then there was Super Bowl Sunday... what a fantastic party at the Breilings house where we were so wonderfully staying (THANKS!)... what a devastating loss for the city of Seattle... ugg.. I don't want to talk about it

After finally picking out a car (photo in the next post).  I celebrated by taking a day off of "adult responsibility" and skied at Crystal.  Still not a lot of snow, but an inch or two overnight made for velvet groomers with an empty crowd.

And before we left Seattle, we enjoyed a Thunderbirds hockey game and a comedy show in Fremont with Casey and Taylor (who hosted us in their awesome house for the second half of our Seattle time (THANKS!)) and other friends.  I shouldn't fail to mention that Taylor and I built legos.  Because we can.

Our time in Seattle was fast and furious.  Adjusting to the overwhelming-ness of the US and busy lives wasn't easy but it was good to take care of some of the necessities of life and to see all of our great friends!

South America Recap

[Real time note: We did arrive back in the U.S. on 1/26 and immediately got very busy!  Trying to catch up the blog now!]

Since we gave the other places a recap, we can't leave out South America!!  We spent all of our time in Argentina and Chile (mostly Argentina), so we won't speak for the entire continent, just these two countries.

--In both countries, we experienced a life that is much more laid back than in the USA (and Europe for that matter).  People are relaxed and happy.  Both Argentina and Chile seem to be trying to emulate Europe and it seems like Europeans might actually have a closer tie with South America than with North America.

--We did not exactly experience "summer" weather in Southern Patagonia.  I guess you could compare southern Patagonia to what summer must be like in northern Canada. It was not too warm, VERY windy, and variably rainy/cloudy/sunny throughout the day.

--Bariloche (where we spent 3 weeks) is a beautiful spot to enjoy the mountains of Argentina!  We would definitely recommend it for anyone who is wanting to get into the outdoors, but maybe not wanting to travel all the way to the tip.  They have great hikes and refugios to hike to in the area.

--Learn Spanish. I (Shannon) definitely had a lot of opportunity to use the Spanish I did know in both of these countries.  People spoke English less than any other place we visited. Though challenging at times, it really forced us to learn the language as much as we could. We also found that if you're at least trying to speak Spanish, people will try to help you out.

--If you want to enjoy delicious meals and good wine for an affordable price, go to Argentina! Malbecs and beef galore!

--Argentina definitely has a laid-back European culture that we enjoyed for the most part (although had a hard time adjusting to eating at 9 or 10pm!).  Speaking of that, we recommend going to a restaurant around 8 or 8:30- you'll never need reservations and you'll get great service because the locals aren't eating there yet!  Most of the restaurants don't open until after 8 PM.

--Chile felt a little more "sophisticated" than Argentina which has its perks... but also a higher cost of living.

--Stray dogs ran amok throughout Argentina... but sort of in a good way, they seemed happy and living the dream (although with some real battle wounds).  Made us wonder if cooping our dogs up was really a great thing.

--Alfajores or, as we called them, Ding Dongs are delectable and a good pick me up if you're struggling through laid back South America with an American prerogative.

-Dulce de Leche is basically caramel and entirely delicious and EVERYWHERE and eaten with EVERYTHING (says Scott).  Shannon isn't so keen on eating it in the morning.  Scott fears no morning sugar overload.

-The buses in Argentina were impossible to book in advance.  But it worked out great and they were fine.