Category: Skiing

Yesterday I skied at Santa Fe Ski Basin. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to ski while I was in the Pacific northwest: they didn’t have any snow and I didn’t have nearly enough time. The Ski Basin has quite a lot of snow now, over half of their upper mountain is open. It started snowing a few minutes after I showed up and snowed lightly all day, putting about two inches of snow on the ground while I was there (and making the drive home interesting: the truck in front of me slid off the road, and I saw one big long truck that had clearly done a bunch of circles before ending up in a ditch.) The highlight of the trip was when I got to start fullfilling a New Years resolution: “Learn to talk about my work and physics in terms which are understandable and exciting to the layperson and don’t make me sound like an elitist.” The subject of my first such rant was a yoga instructor who wanted me to explain to him quantum gravity. I gave him this nice beautiful spiel, and just as we were about to get off the lift, he told me about how he was trying to use the concept of a graviton in his yoga: he figured that if you set your body up in the right position you could send out gravitons which were well balanced with the gravitational field of the earth.

Half day skiing at Santa Fe Ski Basin. They need about 2 more feet of snow. The funny thing about the Ski Basin is their trail maps where they have drawn in a lift which is “planned.” The planned lift is called the Millenium lift. Sounds like their a little behind schedule.

There is nothing quite like the silence of snow. This morning the sound of snow woke me up before my alarm went off. Two new inches of new fluffy right outside my bedroom window. Quick to the qubit-mobile and off to Taos for $20 all day skiing! Taos had around three inches of new snow and I spent most of the morning skiing a run on the backside until my legs felt like jello. When my legs felt like jello, well this reminded me of jello shots. At Taos they used to have a tree where people would stop and have a martini. That’s right, a tree. That’s right, martinis. The locals would supply a community batch of martinis. Well, lawsuits and all, you know, and now the martini tree is no more. Instead I grabbed lunch and headed upstairs to the Martini Tree Bar. There I discovered what the straight version of a cool tradition had become: a bar with pool tables, foosball, video game machines, and air hockey. Anyone who visits me will therefore be immediately challenged to one of these games. Better practice.
In the afternoon I made the acquaintance of “K squared,” the son of a national medal of science winner, and, apparently, on a permanent ski vacation. What a life. The fun thing was that K^2 kept giving me puzzles to work on as we went up the lifts. Hard to ski when you’re trying to reason through a logic puzzle. Well at least it makes a good excuse for a few of my terrific crashes.

It snowed here in Santa Fe on Saturday. My brain reacted in the only way it knows how to react to snow: it ordered me to go skiing. So Sunday, I made the journey again to Wolf Creek with UNM grad students, Steve and Devan. At this rate, I might hit more than 20 days of skiing this season!

Yesterday I drove the 3+ hours to Wolf Creek in Colorado to go skiing. And boy was it worth it! While Wolf Creek doesn’t yet have great coverage, most of the mountain was open, and, if you worked for it, you could still large stashes of untracked powder. If they get about another 18 inches they will be in great condition.
My most notable episode was an epic crash I had in the powder. I had climbed up this ridgeline to get to some nice steep tree lined runes with about a foot and a half of powder. It was a super nice day, very hot, and so I wasn’t wearing any gloves. I took off down the run and after about 5 turns I may a spectacular nosedive into the pow. Standing up, I was covered in powder and my hands were freezing cold. I mean really really freezing cold. It was at this moment that I realized that I was dehydrated from both the high altitude and the long climb I had made to reach the stash. Doh. Taking off my glasses was my next smart move. The next few seconds I could feel myself get light headed and thought “Headline: Santa Fe postdoc proves that even with a Ph.D. you can still be a moron.” After a few moments chilling in the sun, however, I recovered and promptly went to buy a Gatorade. Earlier in the morning I had noticed how many people were wearing packs for carrying water. I thought that was kind of funny, but now I think I’m going to go buy one.

My new home comes equipped with one of those nice coat racks which can also double as

an easy access storage unit for my skis and poles. Eat your heart out, my skiing deprived compatriots!

Alta has finally built a top-to-bottom high speed quad. I believe this is morally equivalent to the breaking of the Seventh Seal.

As seen on an advertisement in the Denver airport:

Carve diem!

My vacation: