A Return to the Slopes

18 Years Ago

On a brisk, snowy day on the slopes of Mt. Holly at the Elk Meadows Resort in Utah, one father and his 2 adoring daughters were enjoying a nice, relaxing day on the mountain.  A new layer of perfect powder had fallen over night and the family was enjoying run after run on the quiet, peacefully hill.  And then, the dad decided to take the girls down an extremely difficult black diamond run similar to something you'd see an 

X-Games athlete falling out of a helicopter onto.

Here's where the story gets hazy.

The daughter decided she wasn't into it and she was not feeling all too good about the possible/likely drop to her death.

The dad told her to stop being a wuss.

No one (and I mean NO ONE) called that girl a wuss.

So, in protest, she shot down the mountain like a "bat out of hell."  (According to the dad.)

And the next thing she remembers is opening her eyes for a few seconds while laying down in the snow on the wrong side of a sheer cliff.  

And the next thing she remembers after that, is waking up in an emergency room 12 hours later with no recollection of the past few days.

And I, of course, was the little girl.

Ahhh, good times.

Present Day

So naturally, I jumped at the chance to return to the slopes with my whole family + bring along my daughters to share in all the snowy goodness.
(Not true.  But I went, so I get full credit.)

(Just to be clear, the two fingers that she is sticking out under those gloves are her thumbs.)

It took us about an hour to get all our gear on and then take all our gear off to use the bathroom and then get all our gear on again...

And then about another hour to get our skiis on and then figure out that the bunnyhill was up the mountain and then take our skiis off , walk up the mountain, and then put our skiis back on.

But we made it.

The first step was enrolling the girls in Grandpa's Ski School.

(Since he's got such a spotlessly clean record of safely teaching children how to ski.)

Full disclosure: the girls spent most of the morning trying to figure out how to get back up after skiing about 3 feet and falling down.  Luckily, there are no quitters in this family + we had grandpa to help pull us back up.

At one point, Brooklyn accidentally took off down the hill and started drifting toward the mountain drop-off.  I screamed totally meaningless words at her like: "MAKE A PIE!  MAKE A BIGGER PIE!!"  

"SNOW PLOW! 

SNOOOOOOWWWW PPPPLLLLOOOOOWWWWW!" 

About 3 inches before dropping off through the woods and onto the First Aid Buildings roof, she tipped over and came to a screeching halt.

Leave it to one of my kids to almost fall off a cliff.

It was a rough morning.

AND THEN...

we ate lunch, and honestly, there must have been some magic cheese on our sandwiches, because the girls came back with a vengeance.

They were unrecognizable.  

They both went up the main mountain + managed not to kill themselves.  It's a small miracle that we are all still here with all our limbs intact.

Luke begged me to go with up to the top of the mountain, and justifiably, I flat out refused.

It looked like this:

But worse.

Later, I found out that Aubrey had gone up to the top of the mountain.  And liked it.

And that was our amazing day on the slopes.