We got some natural snow, and enough cold weather for the ski areas to make snow. Saturday the whole family went to Pats Peak for lift serve skiing. They had their bunny hills and three real trails open. The surface snow was surprisingly decent in the morning. We did some technique practice, but our fun for the day ended up being a mad dash down Cyclone. Pats Peak had three real trails open — Valley and Whisper which are greens, and Cyclone which is a black. We noted that each time we took the Hurricane lift up to Cyclone, the clock in the lift shack said 12 minutes later than the previous time. So then it became a competition. We finally managed to get the loop down to 10 minutes. Not only did we beat the chairs back down, but we got 35 chairs ahead out of 113. So that means we took ~7.5 minutes to ride the chair up and 2.5 to ski down. After that the trails were getting scraped off and repetitive, so we headed home.

Then Sunday, Tyson and I went over to Dublin for skate skiing. The trails were in remarkably good condition. They have all the race course trails open. As expected for early season, skating up hills is hard. But I started to remember my technique, and got some really fun down hill runs, though not without a couple crashes.