Skiing the mediocre

Although many explorers, adventurers and professional athletes would like to tout their adventures as grandiose dreams, epic tribulations and great triumphs, we all know mediocrity generally plagues an average amount of missions. This past weekend in Tahoe helped proved the fact that, like people, 49% of adventures are below average.

This particular median escapade started when JT Holmes, Jason Abraham, Elyse Saugstad and I decided to skip out on the White Ribbon of Death on Red Dog at Squaw Valley for one day and mish it down to Carson Pass for a backcountry outing.

Our planned destination. Round Top peak.

My ambitious mind had planned to tackle the Crescent Moon couloir (looker’s right chute) in low-tide gnar conditions ala Jeremy Jones.
My eyes upon first arrival then said, “Well low-tide can’t even begin to explain how dry that couloir is”. Mediocrity was inching its way closer.

Looker’s right couloir looking rockier than Tiger Wood’s marriage.

So immediately our grandiose dreams were vanquished. But we just got up at 6:00 am, drove an hour and a half and didn’t want to ski another day on the W.R.O.D. at Squaw. So we skinned on.

“We’re not turning around. We’re going that way!”

“We found the low-tide gnar!”

The gnarliest of the gnar. Sketchy-log creek-crossing on loose skins and Alpine Trekkers (aka Alpine Day Wreckers).

Skinning up the mediocre.

Average.

And then the trip got so average that photographerJason Abraham didn’t even take his camera out. So there was a total of zero pictures of skiing. Yup. Count that. Zero. We skied right back down our skin track on a solid 20 degree pitch. Whoopee.

So yes, this outing was dramatically anti-climactic. So to leave you all with at least something interesting. Here’s a picture of the super-duper famous JT “Birdman” Holmes post-porty-a-potty-poo. It was such an important moment that I had to take a picture of another person taking a picture of JT’s post-dump exit. It smelled bad and was his second dump of three that day. Well, I guess that’s above average.

Posted by Cody Townsend on December 8th, 2009