A Snowboarding Trip and an Escapade

Sooooo...today we went snowboarding at Dodge. It was amazingly fun. I am also amazingly sore right now. Lol...that was a joke. It's not really amazing that I'm sore. It hurts. Not to complain though because I really had a great day.

We met up with the lovely Ney family in Oakdale. We drove up together and got to Dodge at around 7-7:30-ish. We, after a prolonged period of sitting around waiting for our lift tickets and rentals and such to be configurated, got out on the slopes, well...not until our lesson at 10. So we had the lesson (originally Shelbie, Paige, Shayden and Shannen were all in the same lesson with me, but in the end, we were tragically separated--I in the original lesson with 2 little girls I didn't know, and all the others transfered to a beginner lesson...lame...anyway,). And after the lesson, we all had lunch together, taking up a massive corner of the lodge. We kinda sat around and talked a bit before hitting the slopes again. Shyloh, Shelbie and I were originally together, but Shyloh and I kinda lost Shelbie (well, she wasn't lost, just behind us)...and after the 2 of us going up and down the bunny hills a couple times the guy running the lift started telling us we should take a bigger lift. He told us which one to take, chair 2, and after a few more runs, we caught up with my daddy, let him know what we wanted to do, and headed over there. We wanted to board over, as it was a short, easy ride, but ended up significantly lacking in the momentum necessary to get where we were going, considering the flat terrain...in short, after a couple minutes of scooting and getting nowhere, we gave up, took off our boards and hiked. That said, once we got to the lift, we strapped in and looked at the lift, becoming more intimidated and nervous by the minute at the speed at which the lift was ascending the mountain. But we gathered our courage, decided we could, in fact, get down this mountain, and got on the lift, which was a 3-seater and really was going pretty fast. Well...

About halfway up, we looked down to see a much smaller chair, going much slower down a hill much less steep than ours, and to note with ever growing despair the fact that the chair was clearly labeled "Chair 2". Oh nooo!!!! We had gotten on the wrong lift!!! We looked up to see that in fact, painted on the lift we were on was "Chair 3". What had we done??? We looked at the mountain ahead of us and immediately I think both of us began shrieking and crying out to God to spare us and allow us to reach the bottom alive. (Truth--we really did do this--we were genuinely terrified) The mountain we were headed towards was the Face, and we were going to have to try to go down it. Ahhh!!! We, after several moments of agonizing deliberation, decided that we would rather fall on our face, roll down the hill head over heels and die at the bottom in the midst of the glory that we had gone down, than suffer the humiliation of not getting off the lift and riding all the way back to the beginning to get off there.With that mindset, we began seriously to discuss funeral plans, if one of us happened to survive the other. (no joke, we did) We prayed fervently all the way up the lift, and we were wondering how soft the snow was, if maybe we would better survive a jump off the lift than to go down the slope. (It was pretty bad.) When we got within sight of the guy running the lift at the top, we began frantically motioning for him to stop it, to let us off without falling head over heels down the little off-ramp thingy. He just laughed at us, and DID NOT stop the chair. When we finally got off, we realized that the Face was not the only path we could take, there were, in fact, several options. Neither of us knowing anything about anything concerning the path we had chosen, only knowing that each of our options were labeled "more difficult" excepting one black diamond path and a double black diamond path, both of which we were obviously avoiding at all costs, we asked the guy running the booth which path to take, and he told us, while laughing and making fun of us. Our pride being sufficiently wounded for one afternoon, we asked a guy sitting next to the slopes for the extra information we needed to get back where we wanted to be. After calling Shyloh's parents and leaving a pathetic voicemail, we set out, nervously, but determinedly. We hiked probably 1/5 of the way, that's just approximating, but in some flat parts we didn't have enough momentum (too much falling and having to sit down because our toes were killing us) so we had to walk. We finally made it out, after several small incidents, including escaping from a forbidding resting spot closed in between some trees and a wall of rocks and snow (scary!). We yelled and hoorayed a little bit at the end because we really didn't think we were ever going to get out. (Actually, we did Dory's "we did it" dance at the bottom of the hill) It was almost fun, and I think both of us will laugh about it later, but it was really scary, actually when we got off the lift I was actually pale...and if you know me you know that I never, ever pale, I turn red. Shyloh said she'd never seen me that white before ever, I guess we were both just terrified.

Later my daddy took us on some harder stuff, actually branching off the same terrifying lift (not nearly so terrifying with Dad, and since we'd been on it before) and it was a lot of fun. We did a really great run right at the end, and we both liked it so much that we want to do that and a couple other harder runs next time we go. Altogether it was a very fun day, with only that one little...uh, escapade...lol, =) Anyways, that was my day.......so, yeah, and I have to get up early for ladies' study in the morning, and my legs are killing me and I'm exhausted so I'm going to go to sleep now...

Good night...♥