Bear Valley and

... remembering how to ski.

Andrew and I left the Bay before dawn to get to Bear Valley sometime around 9. I immediately rediscovered that snow is quite slippery by falling in profound slow motion ... right on to my a**. We bought a pass for the cross-country sky trails and set out -- me on my new skis and Andrew on snowshoes. He had a distinct advantage because I haven't skied in 15 years, and really didn't know that much about it then. Additionally -- I waxed my skis ... so they really didn't work all that well. So we were pretty evenly matched in pace initially -- only occassionally did he have to wait for me.

I learned a few things ... however ... aside from the obvious truth that I am not in skiing shape. Waxing skis is a bit mysterious and difficult ... and begs for either training from some one who's done it, or twenty to thirty lifetimes of trial and error. I am a quick learn though. When my skis didn't perform as I expected -- I didn't give up -- I kept skiing on them until I was exhausted. At some point I actually stopped and adjusted my kick wax up in temperature and polished the glide surfaces of the skis again. Things improved ... I wasn't able to zip around like all those skate skiers .. but I was able to kick and glide, and climbing was still difficult, go figure.

It was a pretty awesome day. Overnight about a foot of snow fell -- adding to a foot or so that had recently fallen. Although it snowed all day, it was never hard, and the temperature was reasonably 22 or 25 degress F. or so. Even after it warmed up a bit -- my guess is it was resoundly below freezing.

I skied about 7 km, or 4 something miles on flat terrain. My first ski since 1994? and I skied 4 plus miles. I'm good with that. It took a while and we ended up stopping around noon-thirty to eat.

We had lunch here, at the grocery store in Bear Valley. Yum, but ... there wasn't enough.

It wasn't all that great of a day for nature photography, being all grey and snowing ... but maybe it was. The cloudyness was great, the amount of snow was huge, it was gorgeuos ... and it was good.