I spent the better part of last week organizing a daytrip for 8 of my friends to Whitetail, PA for a day of snowboarding/skiing. It was only a couple hours away, and they griped about leaving at 8:30am (babies), but we all arrived around 10am, ready for a day on the slopes.
I’d heard from other people that east coast slopes couldn’t compare at all to Tahoe; everything I heard was right. The mountain was more like a hill, the bunny slope was about 20 feet long, the blacks felt like blues, blues felt like greens, the runs were icy with a thin blanket of manmade powder despite it having snowed the night before, and the ticket was still $63. At least I got to snowboard!
We had a pretty good group, ranging from first-timers to more experienced folks. Laura (the annoying/weird girl from work) and I went with Andrew and Jared on the more advanced runs. The rest of the group stuck to greens and blues. We spent a few hours with them in the afternoon, and Laura and I tried to give Gabe (a newbie to snowboarding) some pointers; it was hard because he’s goofy, but he picked it up pretty well! Even though the runs were icy, the relatively easy grade of the mountain gave me courage to try the only double black at the resort. I ended up feathering down half the run because it was too icy to do anything else, but was able to zip down the rest without too much difficulty. In all, I didn’t have any major falls, just semi-falls where I sat down, kept sliding, and got right back up. The only boo-boos that happened were 1) accidentally ran over a kid on skis because he turned right as I turned left, and 2) having a 4-person fall while getting off the lift, since Gabe, Denise, and Andrea all decided to go towards the center and crash into everybody.
I really do miss having mountains that have back trails, where the moguls aren’t blocks of ice, where falling doesn’t mean sliding for over 75 feet. Despite my complaints last season, I now miss lifts that only take you halfway up the mountain, then going to a different lift for the summit, because it means the summit is too high for one lift to go straight up. I guess you have to make do with what you’ve got though; even though the mountains here stink, I plan on going much more this season, otherwise I’ll go out of my mind!
The group posing for a photo before hitting the slopes. Jared, Andrew, Laura, Denise, me, Danielle. Red seemed to be the color of choice this season, and it was kind of hard to tell Andrew and Jared apart sometimes.
At the summit; Whitetail was similar in size and grade to the surrounding hills, so you can see that nothing was too steep.
Laura, Jared, and me at the top, right before sunset. We stayed until about 8pm to check out the night skiing, but it got so cold that we headed back to DC earlier than we planned.
I screwed up my courage and finally bought meat that hadn’t been processed. Ok, so it was individually-wrapped frozen chicken breasts from Costco, but I still defrosted them and cut the raw meat myself, so I’m rather proud. I made a stir-fry dish with the browned chicken, bell peppers, onions, a bit of minced garlic, and added black bean and garlic sauce 
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