My Rain Dance

So as you may know California is in a drought. The gov't. is even saying that 2009 has the potential to be one of the droughtiest years in recorded CA history.  This makes me sad. 

Yes, the sunny warm January days are nice but I also happen to love rain. Especially all that comes with it...

The Watersports

The Kayaking

The Powder

The Refreshment.

We love the ever versatile and lovely Lady California. So if you do too, rain dance with us and lets end all of this drought nonsense.

First day of the season!

I was lucky enough to go snowboarding for one beautiful day at Squaw Valley last week with my dear friend Melissa. 

She's ready to go

Even at the top it was a wonderfully warm day. I loved using the new boots Brady gave me for Christmas.
Since neither of us had been there before we consulted a map often so that we could make use of all that Squaw had to offer. I found that ski-map reading is not one of my skills.
They had a pretty good terrain park there so we hit up the baby area so as not to get intimidated by the pros.
Story time: 

So about 6 years ago, whilst snowboarding, I had a bad experience with ice & friction that resulted in a broken tailbone. I remember the horrible car ride home to the bay area afterwards. For the whole 4 hrs. I couldn't actually sit down. Then for several months in school, rather than subject myself to the embarrassment of being seen with a donut shaped pillow, I used sweatshirts for a little extra cushion to relieve the pain of sitting in plastic chairs for hours at a time. To this day I can rarely sit through a full 3 hours of church without some discomfort as a result of that accident.

So I think this is why I get filled with so much fear when I approach a box, like the one seen above. My worst fear is that my feet will go out from under me and I'll land at just the right angle and relive the horror of a tailbone injury.

But I tried it anyways and as pathetic as it may look, it was super fun.

One of my favorite things about a day like this is the gorgeous views. You can see a little bit of it in this picture but the Lake had an awesome fog resting over it all day.

Sno-Fun

You couldn't tell it from this picture--somewheres around Foresthill-- but here we were about 10 minutes from...

...here. Lusciously fresh snowfall which made me wish I was snowboarding.

But we weren't snowboarding, we were snowshoeing, something I've never actually done before.

It was surprisingly easy to walk in the snow with those foot basket things on.

The boys decided to make a snow cave after about 5 minutes of walking.

It took three men 40 minutes to build and one Brady 4 seconds to destroy. Poor Eric barely made it out alive.

Lesson learned: When creating a covering for your igloo Don't lob a huge snow block on top of your roof of dried twigs it may fall through the aforementioned sticks triggering an igloo avalanche .