Skiing at Northstar

We decided we would try to beat the crowd at Northstar this morning. We woke up at 7am, and left for Northstar at about 8:00am, arriving at about 8:45am. By this time, others had already arrived, so no virgin snow for us:)

Most of my friends had wanted to ski the back hills of Northstar on the black diamond trails, specifically Burnout. I am not skilled enough to tackle those trails, so I decided to stay mostly on the front mountain, skiing the Lumberjack trail. This is a fairly long green run, and gave me lots of room to improve on parallel skiing.

On my second trip down the hill, a snowboarder merging in from a steep slope(I think it is Sidewinder) collided with me and knocked me on the back. I was in a great deal of pain, but luckily there were no further injuries...

For lunch, I met up with my fellow skiiers at the Summit deck for lunch. If I was alone, I would probably had not chosen this location for lunch since I need to go do a blue slope to get back to the base of the mountain, so I decided to take full advantage of this opportunity. The mountain top actually had pretty good view of the cascading mountains around the Northstar ski resort. I must admit the food was pretty good too! I chow down on a decent size piece of smoked ham, served with a side of grilled potatoes, seasoned with herbs and a not too creamy cole slaw.

After lunch, I worked my way down the hill, first along the West Ridge trail(blue), then onto Luggi and back onto Lumberjack. Physically, though, I am not in skiing shape and I was starting to get a little tired. I did a few more runs on Lumberjack, but I seemed to have less control compare to my morning runs. At about 3:30pm, I decided I will just have some fun. I went down Village Green--the easiest slope on Northstar, and probably all of Tahoe, a couple of times. This run is so gentle, I really did not have to do much to slow myself down. Then I decided to call it a day.

Northstar had done a beautiful job with the village at the base of the mountain. I sat on the couches next to the skating ring, people watched and little and rested while my friends finished up their runs.

We packed up all our gear and headed back to the Bay area at about 5:30pm. This was a popular week for skiing because of it snowed heavily the previous weekend, so there was quite a fair amount of traffic just to get back to the freeway. Along the freeway, it did not improve much either.

It was almost 11pm before we reached our original meetup point in Milpitas. By that time, everyone was too tired to do anything and we headed home.

I was happy to get some snow and started my ski season. Since my volunteer math tutoring program will be starting again soon, it would be difficult for me to get away on 2-day ski trips for the rest of the season.