Tuckermans Ravine 2011

I turned to Jodi last night and said "You know my dear, I'm turning into a mom blogger!" You know, where all you blog about is to goo over your kids. Well, have no fear, we'll have a healthy mix of baby and other adventures.

Starting with my most recent adventure up to New Hampshire to Tuckermans Ravine. It was a hoot! They call it the birthplace of extreme skiing. It was great! My buddies Jack and Patrick went with me and boy was it a good time. Here's a few pics of the event.

We hiked from the very bottom all the way to the top of Mt. Washington and we skied the entire way back down all the way to the parking lot! What a great day!

 Very steep climbing up! The snow was absolutely untouched though! You can see in the picture that people were afraid of avalanche danger in the center so people were avoiding it until the afternoon sun had a chance to heat it up a little bit.

 The ravine is really, really steep. The easiest way down is 40 degrees and most routes are 50+ degrees. That's rough!

Bode Miller was there too! He was amazing!! He went STRAIGHT down the mountain (either route 4 or 5 in the picture below from timefortuckerman.com) with parallel skis only doing two tiny carves at the very very top (above what you can see in the picture) The whole portion of this picture he was just dive-bombing the mountain. Incredible.

Jack about died! He fell head first down a really steep slope for a long long ways. Probably 50 yards or so! Here he is lookin pretty frazzled. He's so lucky he didn't break his neck.

And, as many have already seen, I did in fact forget sun block and man did I get some raccoon sun burn lines!!

Lastly, were the crashes. Pure comedy! The slope is so incredibly steep that people were falling left and right and when they'd fall, they just kept going and going and going. Some people must have rolled 100+ yards! This one skier bombed it at the very top and toppled the whole way to the bottom and then just laid there arms and legs in every direction like a starfish. The crowd went silent instead of laughing like usual because it looked like it hurt so much. Then a pole stuck up from the seemingly lifeless body and everybody started cheering again. It was awesome. You're in constant fear of falling.

This video sums it up best. This amateur video was taken of his buddy and at exactly 39 seconds you see this person go flying past face first screaming "OH MY GOSH!!!" And they go flying all the way down the mountain! Super funny stuff.