One down, two to go!

Although it's 70* as I write this, winter has returned! We had a long cold snap of five or so days where it never got above freezing so the ski areas were making lots of snow. Whitney has been to several practices and it appears to be a small team this year. The good thing about a small group is the nights where it's just her and one other so they can focus on boarder cross skills, which they were able to do last week.

Sunday she went to her first competition of the season down at Wintergreen. It's a rather spread out resort and you start at the top of the mountain and ski down. The resort itself was pretty nice and the course was pretty good. There were only 30 or so people registered and most of them were in the younger age groups. There was only one other girl in Whitney's age group, five or six boys in the next younger age group, three in the 21-24 age group, and the rest were probably 10 and under (maybe 12, but pretty young).

They start with the warm up runs and unfortunately Whitney was only able to get in two runs. I think she would have done better with a couple more. The race is run youngest to oldest age groups, snowboarders first, so she had to wait through all the young kids. She did pretty well for her first time out this season and felt she did better than she did last year.

There's two races this weekend at Wisp. We'll be heading out Friday night since they start early on Saturday morning. Winter is coming back tomorrow and it'll be in the low 40s Friday and Saturday so that should make for some good snowboarding. Good luck, Whitney!

Wacky Weather!

We've been having some pretty non-winter like weather around here. It's been pretty warm and rainy. Much of the snow down at Massanutten has melted. I'm surprised that they can stay open right now. They're just skiing during the day and have cut their night hours. Of course that means that there's no team practice. Hopefully by this weekend things will be better. We're supposed to get about 5 inches of snow tonight and by the weekend it's going to start getting a lot colder. Next week it's going to be in the 30s all week and much colder at night. Sounds like they'll be able to make snow around the clock soon. It's a good thing since I was seeing lots of grass and thin spots on the web cams this morning.

SLOW Start to the Season

It's been a really slow start to the season, more so than last year. Whitney finally made it to a couple of practices this week. Between being out of town and not feeling well, she didn't make it until Wednesday. The slopes were rather sloppy due to the warm weather and not everything is open yet. She went back down for Thursday's practice; they both went well, just not too pretty.

She had been looking forward to the boarder cross competition this weekend at Wisp, MD. She was signed up and we had the hotel reservation set, then when we got to Massanutten for practice on Thursday, I had a facebook message from the Appalachian Series that they had to cancel the BX due to lack of snow. They didn't have enough snow to carve the course for the BX; the slopestyle competition today is still going on. Guess they had enough snow in the park, just not on the hills. So we cancelled our hotel reservation, changed our plans for the weekend, and will wait to see if they're able to reschedule.

She decided to skip today's practice. Saturday ones are good to go to since they're three hours, but between the warm weather the last few days, rain yesterday, fog this morning, the slopes were going to be REALLY messy. Not really worth the drive down. It's supposed to cool down in a few days and the overnight temps are going to be cold so hopefully they'll be able to make some snow and what there is will firm up so practice on Wednesday and Thursday coming up will be a lot better.

Think COLD and SNOW!!

New Hampshire

We just got back from a week in New Hampshire. Love it there!! Besides going to enjoy the beauty of NH, we also went so the family could ski/snowboard. We got 5" of snow one night and flurries a couple of other days. They managed to hit three different ski areas and had a good time at each.

First up was King Pine. Bob and Whitney went there for night skiing. Bad choice of nights since it was the night it was snowing. The roads were rather harrowing apparently. It was a rather tame ski area for NH but a good place to warm up since it was their first time out for the season. Fortunately, they made it home safely after a fun evening.

On New Year's Eve, Bob and Whitney headed to Cranmore and Sarah joined them later. A couple days later the three of them went to Attitash, then it was back to Cranmore for Bob and Whitney. The last two days were really cold; the wind chill was bitter at Attitash and Cranmore was just plain cold.

The biggest problem we ran into was one of Whitney's new boots broke. We have now returned it to the store and are waiting to hear from Burton about it. She's got a rental to get her through until she can get new boots.

Overall we had a great time in New Hampshire. Now it's time to get ready for the snowboard season here in Virginia, the mountain is open and she's ready to go.