Today I went snowboarding at Brighton Resort in Utah.  I am attending a 4 day training class at LANDesk corporate HQ in Sandy, UT.  It was a fairly last minute trip (I bought plane tickets on Friday for a flight on Sunday) and I was selected by U.S. Airways to experience some extra security screenings.  Before I left, I found a resort on the internet that listed night skiing and I saw that snow was forecast for the Monday night that I was there, so I took some gloves and heavy clothes and hoped for the best.

When I got to class, I talked to some of the locals about night skiing and they said that I should call first to make sure that the resort was open at night since it was the end of the season.  I called the resort that I had originally looked at and their voice mail said that they were closed for night skiing.  Bummer.  The hotel clerk told me that there was only 1 resort left that had night skiing, and this was the last week of it.  Woo Hoo!

I was planning to go later in the week, but the class today got out a bit early so I put on all my cold weather clothes (sweat pants under jeans, 3 t-shirts, a sweatshirt and a heavy coat) and drove up to Brighton Ski Resort about 30 minutes away.  Since I hadn’t been snowboarding in more than 10 years, I decided to ‘warm up’ on the beginner run.  I am glad I did!  After about 30 minutes, I moved to the intermediate runs and had a blast.

By about 8p I was pretty tired, but since the lifts didn’t stop, I wanted to get my money’s worth.  I decided to try a different run and promptly sunk in 18 inches of powder.  It was hard to get up and once I was up, I struggled in doing the ‘hop’ to get moving.  The area I was in was just too flat.  I had to unbuckle the boot and walk to place closer to the downhill part.  I finally got going, but this was a harder intermediate run and the terrain was not so consistently down hill.  I slowed myself down too much after a steeper section and didn’t have enough momentum to make it up the small incline.  I squatted down and pushed my self up the hill on my snowboard.  But the little hill sloped into the forest and I quickly found myself in among the trees where the snow was very powdery and this made it difficult for me to stand up.  Once I did get up, I would move forward a few feet and have to navigate around a tree, at which point I would fall down again.  Up down Up down Up down.  I was covered in snow and getting very frustrated.  I ended up pulling myself along via the branches of the trees.  As long as I was headed down hill, I figured I was OK.  It took about 15 minutes to get back to the bottom of the hill.

I didn’t want to leave on such a low note, so although my pants were wet and my butt was frozen and the screen on my cell phone had blackened from the cold, I got back onto the lift.  I was more careful this time in starting out, but within 2 seconds of starting I had a huge fall and rolled for quite a ways downhill.  I decided that I was done.

My co-worker didn’t go skiing but took some pictures of the resort and the surrounding mountains.  I’ll post the good ones when I get them.