Skiing in the Dark

My day started at 5:45 driving up to the lower Sour Dough, near the Mountain Research Station. Let's go skiing before work and so off we went in the pre-dawn. I get up this early anyway, now its just more focused and I get my exercise in. Our lead crazy skied off into the dark and I shuffled along for 45 minutes, slightly uphill the whole way. My skis are waxless so going uphill takes a zillion little baby steps - otherwise I slide backwards and have to use my poles to push myself up - my technique is pretty rudimentary.

I've been too cheap to buy a real head lamp, so I've got this flashlight thingy that goes on the brim of a hat. With the snow reflecting the light, I can see about 15 feet really well - but it is a bit nerve racking to be in the middle of the woods, by oneself, no dog as protector, hoping no mountain lion is hungry. So I sang Christmas carols - loudly.

The leads went about 2 - 3 miles in, I have no idea how far I went, maybe a little over a mile and turned around when they came back down the trail. By now it was light out so careening downhill and huffing uphill was a bit easier with being able to see the rocks and tree roots. Complete trip was about an hour.

If someone had told me a month ago that I would have the lungs to x-ctry ski for an hour I would have laughed. Now I'm wondering what I'm going to do for exercise while we're in North Carolina starting tomorrow... Thanks for reading!