1st night

I am sitting here in front of the offending heater that melted my pants. This morning I was pretty sad when it ran out of propane and I could still see my breath. So I got it refilled and am nice and toasty unless I have to walk away and go to the bathroom or something.

Tonight was my first night of work. I was pretty nervous, and I think my boss was also... everybody stood watching while I backed their bazillion-dollar pride-and-joy out of the shop.

About an hour into the shift, a pea-soup fog settled over the place. Objects like air/water hydrants, signs, lift towers, and sheer cliff edges would suddenly appear in front of me. Then it started to rain. Then it turned into a pretty heavy snow, which then turned into a howling blizzard. We groomed some stuff but it probably didn't matter a whole lot in the end. So we went down and had some coffee and waited for the late shift to show up.

The road is so bad getting here that it is always a possibility that the graveyard shift can't make it up the mountain. So we have to wait and see if they show up before we can leave. If they don't show up, we take a break for a few hours in the well-lived-in (possibly bedbug-infested -- that's "beedbug" in Kiwi) break room/crash pad, then return to work. Luckily they showed up, and we got to go home. Unfortunately, we had to drive down in the snow.

This road is like no other road I have ever seen. Really, no hyperbole, it is absoutely frightening. It's a graded dirt road that has been hacked into this steep mountainside. And it's long, too, maybe six miles of butt-clenching. The maritime environment means it is snow at the top, sleet and slush in the middle, and rain at the bottom. When it's clear it's even scarier because you can see the chasm below. There is, no joke, currently a pile of automotive wreckage about 400 feet below the road in a gully. A guy slid off two weeks ago and they were able to recover the body but not the car. Gawkers have been taking pictures of it.

We chained up the crew-cab pickup and headed down. Snow was blowing over the hood and the wind was shaking the truck. Everybody was laughing and having a great time. Anyhow we made it down and I got back home.

The ski area is the bowl on the top of the mountain on the right.