{"id":1152,"date":"2012-02-01T23:17:48","date_gmt":"2012-02-02T03:17:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/james\/?p=1152"},"modified":"2012-02-01T23:17:48","modified_gmt":"2012-02-02T03:17:48","slug":"get-elevated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/james\/2012\/02\/01\/get-elevated\/","title":{"rendered":"Get Elevated"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been skiing since I was about six. We used to live in Washington DC and Maine was our “vacation spot” if you will. Just like everyone else who lives south of…Maine. Anyways, I got thrown out onto the bunny slopes most likely with some 22 year kid searching for direction in life who was to be my ‘teacher’ while mommy and daddy went and skied at the TOP of the mountain. It was awesome, until I realized that I wanted to get off the seemingly petty bunny slopes and ski with the big boys. It took a few years, but I made it up there. It was even better when my father left his position in the Navy and we actually could call Maine our permanent home. I spent a few years skiing at Sugarloaf- just like I did as a little kid. But then, we turned our sites westward. That’s when it really<\/em> began.<\/p>\n

See, my father had to attend a conference every year at some point to keep his medical license. I was in the third grade during our first trip. It was a whole new world for me. I had never seen such HUGE mountains and such amounts of snow. You’d think that, being from Maine, I’d have seen a lot of snow in my day, but NOOOOOO it was like nothing I could have ever imagined. Just feet and feet of white fluff. It was incredible being in the Rockies for the first time. The feeling I got cannot be replicated on this page, it’s just simply indescribable. Sometimes my favorite part of the day was riding up the chairlift because I could turn around almost 180 degrees (depending on where I was sitting- I had a much better view from the outside seats) and take in the beauty. For the first time in my life, I felt small. Not just small in the sense of being a tiny organism in an incomprehensibly HUGE universe, but rather, I can almost say that I was humbled by the majesty of mother nature. Anyways, I had a point I was getting to.<\/p>\n

The first time I skied in the powder I completely tanked it. I just went head over heels; fell for maybe 40 yards. I hadn’t been going fast at ALL but it was very steep (at the top of Snowbird, UT) and I had no idea how to position my weight in the powder. It’s a completely different style of skiing, one must lean back and keep the tips from sinking too much into the snow.<\/p>\n

Snow. That’s an interesting topic. Usually when I’m bored in class my first instinct is to check out the nightly snowfall for my favorite ski resorts out west (or at least those I’d like to travel to one day). Big Sky, Alta, Snowbird, Snowbasin, Powder Mountain, Vail, Beaver Creek, A Basin, Wolf Creek. Where is the snow? THERE IS NO SNOW THIS YEAR!! It pains<\/em> me to see this. Those poor ski bums. Those poor fathers bringing their sons and daughters out west for the first time. It’s all gone to hell. Actually, from what reading I’ve done- it’s gone to the Arctic. Apparently, the northern Arctic has been been “bottling” a high pressure system and refusing to let it come south as it usually does. Parts of Europe are suffering from incredibly low temperatures and snowfall numbers practically unheard of prior to this winter. These parts of the world- Ukraine, Croatia, and even Alaska- are seeing record numbers and even deaths due to frostbite and hypothermia. It’s not cool at all.<\/p>\n

Let’s hope the snow comes back next year. That’s all for now.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Article:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.google.com\/hostednews\/ap\/article\/ALeqM5j_U6hx6Zk3CU7LM_Ul5Q31Pe6hXQ?docId=3bfd5cadb64b453e9eb16f90ced14ced<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been skiing since I was about six. We used to live in Washington DC and Maine was our “vacation spot” if you will. Just like everyone else who lives south of…Maine. Anyways, I got thrown out onto the bunny … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1297,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/james\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/james\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/james\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/james\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1297"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/james\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/james\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/james\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/james\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/james\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}