Life of a Powaholic: Baker Baker Baker (11/14/09)

I went up to Baker, oh wait let me rephrase that, I went to the zoo yesterday, and it was tasty. Yeah Baker is known for not having any lift lines but wow...there were some stevens -pass-weekend-level-lift-lines there yesterday. I wasn't too shocked though, it was Saturday of their opening weekend...plus it was sunny/slightly overcast for most of the day.

For the first couple hours we (myself and kyle) sessioned the chair 5/north face/danger zone area. This area still had a lot of fresh snow which was awesome, and there were little things to jump off of everywhere (and big things too, holy fack). I don't know baker for shat, and I'm sure we hit some "insert gnarly baker local name here" runs, and they truly are gnarly.

Then things got really bad. In the danger zone area rider's left of north face, kyle decided he wanted to do a cliff drop to straight line to cliff drop. I'm guesstimating this decision was based off of the amount of thc in his system (don't worry everyone I don't smoke and ride). Well anyways, he crashed on the first cliff, did a couple scorpions, then flew off of the second cliff which was only about 10ft. I yell to see if he is ok and I don't hear anything...I begin to worry. I ride down around the cliffs and I see one of the scariest things I have ever had snowboarding. Kyle was upside down under the snow in a tree well. A skier that saw the accident too is right next to me and we move uphill to kyle and begin to un-bury him from the snow. After about 30 seconds from when we saw him from under the snow we clear his face from all the snow. This was so so so scary. This accident just confirms once again I am horrible luck and no one should ever hang out with me ever.

After we recover from this incident we realize his helmet has tree bark implanted into quite a bit of his helmet. He says he remembers hitting the tree with his head and if he wasn't wearing a helmet, this accident could have been a lot worse. Scariest accident I have ever seen snowboarding for sure.

Well we then ride the rest of the run which is really good and even a few surprising faceshots and pillow drops were found. To calm down we ride some chair 2-chair 1 "austin runs" and we are the happy again.

We then decide to ride over to heather meadows and eat some lunch and then meet up with some friends (Dillon, Daryn, Jacob, and Devin). At the lodge I wait for what seems like an eternity to get my much-loved salmon chowder bread bowl and when I finally order I found out THEY ARE OUT OF CHOWDER. I almost begin to cry I was so let down, I had to sacrifice for a chicken burrito. What...is...this. Oh well it was good and it made me feel like I was gonna have a heart attack so I would say lunch was a success.

We then met up with all of my friends listed above on Chair 3 I believe and we rode all over the mountain from there. My personal favorite was riding in the trees just out of bounds along chair 8. It was still poohtastic in there, and it reminded me a lot of one of my favorite areas at stevens. My early season legs wore at around 330pm and we then called it quits after a butter-filled, surfer slasher, last run.

Spinny, buttery, banana fun...