Last weekend I was invited to go skiing up in the Lake Tahoe area with some people I've gotten to know here. Having skied a few times in the last few years, with increasingly more success and less hard landings, I jumped at the chance to see California's premier winter vacation destination. I was not disappointed. The runs were beautiful, the snow was plentiful and the views were fantastic. I just wish I was a better skier. What really gets me is when I am struggling to get down some black diamond slope and a teenager comes whizzing by me, usually on a snowboard. Then I really feel like a ski chump. But otherwise it's fun to be out there and enjoy the mountain, as it were. Only one downside and that is the increasing cost of this activity. I paid $54 for my lift ticket on Sunday at your basic high-elevation mountain ski area, and $64 on Monday at one of those "fancy ski resorts" (Northstar at Tahoe). Kind of makes it an elitist sport doesn't it... well I guess it was always that way, even when I remember paying $35 to ski Breckenridge in 1995. (and I thought that was a lot, too)
Just one other thing to report and that is the long hellacious drive I had on Saturday to get up there. The California Dept. of Transportation was requiring everyone to drive with chains on their tires, in case they were not already operating a 4 wheel drive vehicle. For most people, this means either paying somebody $20 to put on the cables over your tires, or doing it yourself. Being the strapping young man I am, I opted to save the $20 and do this myself. After 10 painful and dirty minutes "clothing" my front tires on my Ford Focus, I was proud to have done it and rejoined the main traffic, advancing at a snail's pace up the pass. Then 1 mile later the chain on my left tire snapped with a sickening "pop". Oh Chr-t I said to myself, getting out and picking up the thin mangled steel cable. It was a mistake to buy the cheap $35 special at the auto parts store. I ended up spending another $69 on the mountain for new cables. These luckily were of better quality and lasted me the whole trip.
