Snomoshredding: Spring Creek

Charly and friends snomoshredded Spring Creek today. What is sno-mo-shredding? Well, my dearest friends, snomoshredding is when you take a snowmobile, throw a snowboard rack on it, then ride it out into the backcountry to find powdery untracked lines of snow to ride down. To further explain just how brilliant the idea is, let me tell you that Charly told me early this morning(6am) that he didn't sleep at all because he was so excited to go today. As we began getting dressed, though, I opted out of it for today. Something just felt funny about it, and in the end, after eight hours of riding, Charly told me they only took two thirty second runs, got stuck in the pow a ton, and wiped using snowballs. With me wanting a warm day filled with hot chocolate and nursing my soar body from the previous days riding, it ended up being a good call, as I am not nearly as devoted to the sport as others are.

Despite it all, Charly talks of how nice just being out there it is. I love that he is an adventurer. I did miss out on them digging a pit in the snow to check the stability of the pack. It's something that has been on my wanting to do list for awhile now.

*This photo was taken on the first snowmobile shred day of the season, but it's of the same place they went to and so I thought I'd include it.

Merry Christmas

We spent Christmas in Blackfoot with Charly's family this year, but hope to make  it to FL this summer and say hello to the 321. Charly woke me up to a white Christmas. Fresh snow, white fog, white branches, white power lines...even the black horse across the road held frost on his long ebony lashes.

Mama Hill introduced us to Quarto, we sledded, and one sister in law is due to have a child in a week while the other had a due date to announce. Her ninth! This Christmas week will be filled with days to Targhee, sno-mo-shredding (got some avalanche and backcountry hiking gear from Charly), and climbing in Jackson.

Amsterdam: around town

Amsterdam: bike ride

Dad and I rented some bikes and went for a five hour bike ride around the countryside. Amsterdam is the bike capital of the world, there are even stop lights for bike traffic. It's a bit hectic in the city when you're biking, but once you reach the open spaces of the countryside it's unreal how beautiful and wide open it becomes. Imagine children playing in canals, tugging themselves across to the other side with a rope that sits in the water and is long enough to sink to the canal floor, allowing little boats to go through, when not in use. The little houses that line the canals are so quaint and cute. I could envision myself with a wooden cutting board in the kitchen of one of them, slicing up green peppers and cooking...whatever the dutch cook.
We came upon a church in a little town where people took their unwanted items to the trash can in old, creaky, wooden wagons with steel handle pulls. We took turns going to the top and looking out at world (to keep our bikes and stuff from being stolen.)

Amsterdam LDS Temple

These posts are late, but they are here. I hope to get all of our trip out during this Christmas break, seeing as how I took this trip with my father back in August.

Good Tree Huntin'

Hand cut tree, carried by snowmobile. Presents with homemade named tags wrapped in butcher paper and tied with holiday ribbon. Homemade ornaments  from decades of time. One wet nosed, cold, happy, puppy.

                                            Merry Christmas

Mosiah 15:15

                          An already used photo, in an unused way.

Some of the Lovely Places I've Seen

1. South Africa 2. El Yunque, Puerto Rico 3. Tetons, WY 4. Holland

Six and a Half Hour Naps

Yesterday Jenna, Stephen, Joe, Jordan, Conrad, and Charly and I woke up at five, drove to Targhee, and did some of this:

Followed by this:

It's a "throw your day off" kind of feeling when you've already hiked, shredded, and made it home by ten thirty am. After many restless nights sleep in the past week, what with all my professors creating day before Thanksgiving deadlines and Charly being on a business trip to Vegas, waking up at 5am didn't help anything. Joe had to be back at the shop by eleven to open though, and so it was.

After we took a run off of the "bad" on Targhee we:
napped for two and a half hours, got a tutorial on wet plat collodion by Blake, napped some more instead of climbing(thank you Jenna and Stephen for the records), ate Thai food(spicy chicken curry fried rice please), and then I napped for another four hours while Charly watched Alias. I napped until it was time to snuggle under the quilt I sewed myself and then I woke up and ate leftover curry fried rice the next morning...as I speak right now.

That photo of Maycee? That's how she gets after she chases us on our snowboards down the mountain. Curled up and dozy on Charly's lap while driving home. We didn't take her up to the top. Instead Charly went and got her out of the car while I waited a little ways up the mountain for Jenna and Stephen. Maycee came charging up the mountain and then charging down when I took off.

Rail Jam 2012

This year's rail jam officially took place seven days ago. I've decided not to post two hundred photos that I took. Instead, here are a few favorites. If you are just dying to see more, take a looky look here and find the album of photos I took. There's a plethora of riding photos there so these few are more of faces than anything else.

We sipped Cocoa Bean hot chocolate down our throat and bundled up for the event. See the gloves I'm wearing in the first photo with the cut off fingers? No, that's not some new fad, and no, I'm not just weird. I cut those fingers off for the sole purpose of picture taking.