Roundabout half a meter of fresh in two days! The Berge are looking the part: white all over the place! All we need now are a couple bus loads of Dutch tourists and some Russian culture-luddites and you’d think it was Christmas!

I’ve read my fakebook feed, and I’ve been out there sniffing the produce and despite the breathless instagramming and pictures of dudes getting shacked – I’m reminded of the timeless words of that master of prose: Flavor Flav -Don’t Believe the Hype!

While it’s a good start, the first half of that snow fell with considerable transport, so you got wind-loading combine with bare nuts all over. The temperatures were really low, minus 17 yesterday, which used to be kinda normal but now causes hyperventilating, so the snow is fluffy and weightless – all the way to China. And when I say China, I mean bare rock.

So you kinda got two choices: 1) run the rapids, watch the P-Tex fly and hope when you fall that your motor centers remain intact or 2) roll the amp all the way to eleven and hope that when it all comes down behind you you live long enough to tell anybody stupid enough to believe it that you were performing “stuff management.”

Another dump. Then you can blow up all your followers. Don’t forget to jack your retention to 16.

Today – I went out with my oldest (10) for a event run by MC2alpin in Kutai- “kids on tour.” A guided ski tour for kids from about 8 to 14 with the possibility to rent gear that they need to tour. For 29 euros! All day program. No parents allowed!

They ask that the kids bring their own alpine skis and boots, and then they get hooked up the a contour start-up touring adaptor, a kind of BCA trekker for kids made of plastic that is more about reality than radness. It works really well, and my son has been using his for two years now! They also have kids skins- relatively inexpensive skins with kid-rotator-cuff friendly glue. Both of these things are Werner Koch’s baby over at Contour – and he’s doing great! Products like these do more to build the sport than Dead Bull – but get less press. Too bad.

They took off for some some low angle, easy-peasy powder and parents who were so inclined were treated to a guided tour with newbie tips and a beacon refresher course. Nice!

I was cold. It was minus 7 out and I was dressed to make like somebody was chasing me, but the tenor of the day was Sunday stroll with the hounds. Nuts. I got a refresh on some info, so it was worthwhile. It’s amazing what you forget after a while, and maybe the searing pain in my fingertips will serve to imprint this info more permanently into my cerebellum- like that time I tested my BB gun on my leg.

Henry was warmly dressed (no dummy) and had a good time. I was able to get a series of linked turns through some trees down to the bottom and didn’t blow an edge doing it, Henry and his new buddies were making remarkable turns for a group of pre-teens through what was, for them, over the knee.

Everybody was happy. 

Tomorrow I gotta fly all the way to summer in California- but I’ll be back by next weekend, so look after the pow, and let me know where all that snow blew to so a can shralp it when I gets back – K?