5 posts tagged “snow”
Went skiing at Steven's Pass yesterday again with Milly, Atul and Nabeel, and like last time my initial misgivings about skiing were dispelled once I got out onto the slopes. I definitely think I improved my skills to the point where I can almost do the parallel turns thing (rather than the snowplough technique), so maybe next time I'll be brave enough to attempt a blue run! The key seems to be keeping one's weight forward and knees bent; from this position, it's much easier to maintain balance and control even if it seems counterintuitive because your first impulse is to lean back to slow down, which is a sure-fire way of falling on your backside. Experienced skiers will tell you this time and time again, but it's one of those pieces of advice that is hard to put into practice until you take a risk and just try it.
Time for some photos!
I think I'm gonna have to buy some better snow chains, which were mandatory on Steven's Pass that day because of the snowfall. If we'd gone in my car I think we'd have been there all day trying to put them on...
By the way, the special forces ninja in the first photo is Milly, who unfortunately didn't get to try out her fab new ski gear as much as she hoped that day thanks to a bad dehydration headache :(. Atul, on the other hand, got maximum value for his money and broke in his new snowboard... and managed to avoid wiping me out getting off the chairlift too so I was happy :).
As you can tell from the photos, we actually ended up night-skiing, from about 5pm to 9pm (Steven's closes at 10). I think it's actually better because you don't have the glare from the sun and there are fewer people around, but on the other hand it's definitely colder. (Note to self: buy some hand and foot warmers to insert on the inside of my boots and gloves -- nothing like the fear of frostbite to detract from your enjoyment!) The original plan was to leave at 6.30am, but that got vetoed at the last minute and we made the decision to head out at 10am instead (and enjoy a few extra precious hours of sleep). Unfortunately, there was no parking by the time we got to Steven's so we decided to take a 3-hour detour and have lunch/afternoon tea at Leavenworth (or Tacky Town as Milly dubbed it).
I will leave it to the Leavenworth website to fully pimp the delights of "Washington's Bavarian Village", so without further ado I now bring you the definition of irony:
On a side note, I did feel a pang of guilt (okay a fleeting one) about how much skiing seems to be a sport for the relatively affluent. Seventy bucks a pop for ski rental and lift pass (not to mention getting to the ski fields in the first place) makes skiing a non-trivial undertaking... Even if you decide to "save money" by buying your own equipment, I think $500 is pretty much the floor for how much you'll need to outlay. Oh well, at least it's cheaper than crack*.
Ski photos galore on Picasa (not to mention some featuring aforementioned Tacky Town).
Even more snow today! Had a mini-dinner party the night before (thanks Riz for cooking up a storm, I feel guilty now for only contributing one dish) and Atul ended up crashing on the couch when he couldn't get his car out of the visitor lot thanks to the snowfall that started in the late evening... I didn't feel confident my car would make it and I had no clue how to put on the snow chains I bought for my (cancelled) San Fran roadtrip, so this morning we walked to work (although Atul wimped out and caught the bus for the last leg).
More snow. More cars abandoned by the side of the road. At least people were aware of the impending snow storm this time around (and it shouldn't be as bad as the one around Thanksgiving weekend), but it still makes for a frustrating commute... Apologies for the blurry pics (taken from my camera phone) -- the one on the left taken from inside my office building (but not my office, I'm not senior enough to have a window :( ) and the other on the walk to the car park.
Wow. The snow kept on falling today, and while it had stopped by the time I left the office (just after 7.30pm), its effects were still being felt. It took me 40 minutes to get to the gym thanks to a jam that resembled bad peak hour traffic, a trip that typically takes me 5 minutes on a normal day. By the time I finished my workout, the situation had cleared but on the way to the supermarket to pick up some milk and cereal I saw car after car abandoned by the side of the road on Redmond Way... I'm not sure what their owners were thinking, since I was able to drive about just fine (albeit carefully). Perhaps they were just freaked out by the notion of driving through snow, something that mustn't happen here very often (or quite to this degree). Yes, it's late November so it's approaching winter, but by my calculations Seattle has used up its customary two days of snow for the year. A harbinger of climate change or just some freaky one-off?
Update: I've uploaded some photos of the snow freakiness onto Picasa Web; here's one of them below. Check out more on my Snow album on Google. Also some news reports on the snow fall in Seattle (more tipped for Wednesday!) and Vancouver.
I have officially cured my phobia of driving in the rain -- the possibility of losing traction in the wet is nothing compared to the reality of almost complete lack of traction in the snow. I will post about my trip to Vancouver over the Thanksgiving weekend, but first I want to talk about the harrowing 7-hour drive back from Vancouver to Seattle while I'm still on an adrenalin high!
So today's Sunday, and it actually started to snow on Saturday night (around 4pm, which is not really night but it certainly felt like it). My Uncle Patrick tells me it snows once, maybe twice in Vancouver each year, so I was lucky to witness it. It was a bitch to drive in though, with the snow having piled up overnight (and actually hadn't stopped falling by the time I left the city).
For some reason, the path out of Vancouver on the I-99 was rutted and bumpy, but somehow I made it to the border. The basic technique is to follow the tracks made by the car in front of you -- the worst thing you can do is to try and forge your own path through the snow, a sure way to slip and slide and get bogged. I was driving at half or less of the posted speed limit, so my overall average speed for this trip dropped like a stone to roughly 14mph (according to my GPS unit, more on which later). Adding to my frustration was a 2-hour queue to get through border control (you know the queue is long when you crawl past speed limit signs that mock you with "80km/h" peeking out from underneath a layer of snow). I guess I got the double whammy -- delays from the snow and all the American residents (like me) going back on the last Sunday of Thanksgiving. It was during that crawl time that I spun my wheels the most; the tyres just didn't want to grip and the traction control warning light lit up frequently. It was also when my bladder decided to make itself known a few times; my solution (to put it somewhat delicately) involved an empty coffee cup and I shall say no more than that :).
I stopped for gas not long after getting back onto American soil, and it was a scene of chaos. Some people were resigned to not being able to move for the night, their cars stuck in deep snow. Others were desperately fitting snow chains to their tyres. The prospect of my having to sleep the night in my car waiting for the snow to clear loomed very large indeed, especially since at that gas station I witnessed even big 4WDs spinning their wheels and getting nowhere. Up to that point, I wished I had one of those SUVs that I despise under normal circumstances, but when a Jeep Cherokee gets stuck, what use is a little Honda CRV or Toyota RAV4 going to be?
Actually, once I got back onto the freeway, the snow seemed to have thinned a bit, to the point where I was making some good time and speed (30mph, which felt fast compared to the crawl I was going at before in Canada). A mind numbing 3 hours later, I was back in Seattle, where it had clearly been snowing but where weather conditions had reverted to an insistent but manageable drizzle. At least the roads were relatively clear, something I can't say for the I-5 leading back to Canada, which in stretches was simply choc-a-block with cars -- oh how I pitied those poor Canucks heading home undoubtedly after some Black Friday largesse...
I am so thankful to Volkswagen now for designing a car that managed to get me home in one piece. I made full use of the anti-lock brakes ("what's that pulsing I can feel in the brake pedal?"), the traction control ("dammit my wheels are spinning, my tail is swerving and the car is moving backwards!") and the stability control ("was that my tail going out again?"). What made me even more grateful was seeing all the cars ploughed headfirst into snow drifts by the side of the highway. Obviously some people either didn't have these electronic lifesavers, or drove so foolishly as to nullify their effects -- for example, I recall seeing a Mazda RX-8, an Infiniti G35 coupe and a Lexus IS all either stuck by the side of the road or the driver desperately trying to achieve takeoff by flooring the gas pedal!
During this trip, I also discovered the fallibility of GPS systems -- my Garmin nuvi 350 is pretty easy to use, and it will certainly get you to your destination, but half the time it won't take you via the route the locals will take you. Whoever can figure out how to add this local knowledge into their routing algorithms will be set for life. On the other hand, I wouldn't leave for a strange place without it -- there's something very reassuring about always knowing where you are and in which direction you're heading, even if (or perhaps especially when) it's the wrong one!
And finally: it's GOOD TO BE HOME!!! (Photos to come...)
