First Day of School

After a week-and-a-half of fun on the slopes with his team it was time for Wild Man to knuckle down today: back to school. It was an early morning for the Valtenbergs boys with yoga at 6:15AM, a hearty breakfast followed by the short drive over the summit to Maxie’s new home for the winter at Sugar Bowl Academy. As we crossed the freeway from Powder Haus the mayhem on the interstate was pretty evident: traffic at a crawl and cars sliding all over the place on top of the wet snow from overnight. Very glad we didn’t have to battle that!

There’s something like 35 winter term students in grades six through eight at the school, rounded out by another 25-or-so full year students in grades nine through 12. So many nationalities it’s hard to count, a handful of Olympics and Freeride World Tour hopefuls amongst them, all nestled away in the woods a short walk down the hill from the village gondola. Mondays will be the only day of the week when Max isn’t on skis, and he wasn’t entirely pumped about that fact this morning given it was a powder day at the tail end of a storm that dropped 55 inches of snow on Donner Summit! It’s going to be a demanding quarter for him: his curriculum will be compressed into 60% of the time usually taken to teach it and four of his weekdays will be nine hour days (four of them on skis). But he’s pumped and day one went well, with a new buddy and all kinds of stories about what he learned.

Even though this week is quite busy for me work wise, there was some limited time for a few turns this morning: a very nice byproduct of needing to get Wild Man to Sugar Bowl 40 minutes before the chairs opened was being on the fifth chair up the mountain with an untracked run top-to-bottom on Bacon in some exceptionally deep snow. Always fun to hear hoots and hollers from randoms looking down from above on the chairlift. The second run down Bacon before the powder crowds arrived was almost as good as the first!

This most recent storm wasn’t as nuts as the one that hit us on Christmas, but it delivered nonetheless: 55 inches/140 centimeters of snow in the span of three days. It started out wet, but yesterday in the middle of the onslaught it was cold and dry, with accumulation rates exceeding two inches an hour during the middle of the day. The girls and I enjoyed some excellent fresh tracks on East Face and down Lincoln before they headed to head back to Sonoma County for a return to reality. I skied solo waiting for Maxie to finish the day with his team, thinking I could give my old bones rest once he was done at 3PM. No dice: he noted there was still an hour left to ski before the lifts closed, and he made sure to mentioned that cold, dry snow doesn’t come along every day. Keen to show me all the gullies, chutes and drops he’d been skiing all day, I had to remind him more than once I’m no longer a spring chicken. We were one of the last cars left at Sugar Bowl when we skied through the parking lot back to the car and it was almost dark by the time we got back to Powder Haus. Solid day.