Event: TMC Snow Trip November 2003 Event Date: 11/28-29/03 Written By: Warhawk Date Written: 12/01/03

As the Thanksgiving break drew near, we here at the Mowers command post were busy hammering out the details of our first ever TMC Snow Trip! We prepared a plan, discussed the details, and then promptly threw out said plan. We then proceeded to plans 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Finally we decided on our final plan, which was somewhere around plan 8. We finalized plan 8 and then… seemingly from outer-space came PLAN 9! At the last minute we were given the opportunity to stay in lovely Sutter Creek, at the residence of Spiderman’s aunt and uncle. This changed everything, and meant that PLAN 9 would involve not one, but TWO days of fun in the snow. Finally, me, Kraz, Dima and Arch (from the typ0 clan) were committed to PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE!

We awoke at an hour that no sane person should ever be allowed to be awake at, and embarked on our journey (BIG thanks to Arch for driving). Our destination was the fabulous Kirkwood Ski Resort. We had Dima’s GPS device to guide us on our path. All was well, except that it just so happened to be Black Friday, on this day. This meant that Dima was in a state of consumer frenzy. Using his trusty GPS device he led us to office max (or possibly depot) for some walkie talkie radios that were supposedly on sale. Unfortunately it turned out to be quite a wild goose chase as the walkie talkie radios were out of stock. That little detour out of the way, we were back on the road. We made one more stop, as we neared our destination. This time to radio shack where Dima satisfied his consumer frenzy by purchasing some 17 dollar Motorola walkie-talkie radios.

Finally we arrived at Kirkwood, and met up with Spiderman and his brother Psychosomatic. Unfortunately the Kirkwood day passes are quite overpriced. Dima and I purchased season passes, and then Dima aided Kraz and Arch in “ripping the system” purchasing some “discounted” tickets. Kraz went off to rent his equipment, and the rest of us hit the slopes. We stayed in contact with Kraz over the radios… that is, until Kraz lost his on the very first run of the day. Dima then embarked on a quest to recover his lost radio by announcing that he was missing a radio over his remaining radio. These announcements were made roughly every 2.9 seconds, until finally, a girl (who we will call Lisa) answered. The conversation went something like this:

Dima: has anyone found a purple Motorola radio???
Lisa: I found one!
Dima: Is it purple?
Lisa: yeah
Dima: does it have some green on it?
Lisa: yeah
Dima: Can I meet you at the bottom of list 5 and get it from you?
::dead silence::
Arch: Denied!

This sent Dima into a rage. He tried every trick in the book, including the ol “guilt trip” but Lisa wouldn’t have any of it. Dima had a few choice words for Lisa, which I will not repeat here… let just say they were way “over the line.”

Another highlight of the day was the extended and completely unplanned snowball fight that broke out between me, Dima, Spiderman and Psychosomatic. We all hurled large chunks of snow at each other for quite some time. I could explain to you how much fun this was, but I think you just had to be there to fully appreciate it.

After a long day on the slopes, we headed back to Sutter Creek, were we would be staying for the night. Spiderman and Psychosomatic’s aunt and uncle (Tom and Anne) were extremely friendly as usual, and fed us a nice dinner. Sitting down, watching TV by the fireplace was by far the best way to end the day.

We all slept like logs upstairs, and when the alarm went off it required an extreme test of motivation to get out of bed. Luckily we all made it up and headed over to the Coffee house that Tom and Anne own. SUTTER CREEK COFFEE ROASTING CO. Is definitely the place to go if you are anywhere near the area. We enjoyed a nice breakfast there and then headed back to Kirkwood.

This day turned out to be even better than the first day. We did a lot of traversing off the marked trails in search of good powder. We ended up finding more rocks than powder (as the scrapes on the bottom of my new board can attest too) but we had a lot of fun anyway. A couple of times we ended up getting a bit stuck out in the rocks. We had to convince Dima not to jump off of a large rock that had instant injury written all over it. Finally we were able to talk him out of it. A few minutes later he got himself stuck behind another large rock. He was unwilling to hike up and around it, so instead he was faced with jumping and sliding down a small ravine that went through the rock. This time, instead of trying to convince him not to jump we did the opposite. Spiderman climbed up the rock and slid down the middle of it, just for fun and to show the now apprehensive Dima that it was safe to jump. Finally Dima made the jump and slid down the middle of the rock.

The radios provided hours of entertainment for us. We were able to eavesdrop on other peoples conversations, and create a bit of chaos on the airwaves. At one point some Spanish speaking people started talking on the channel. Dima heard this and started replying in Russian, then Kraz piped in with some French. Arch then spoke up and said “what is this? The multilingual channel?” To which another unidentified speaker said something to the effect of “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir” to which Kraz replied “oui oui mon ami!” (its funny when you translate it… really).

We had several more snow fights over the course of the day, and thoroughly enjoyed all of them. Before we realized it, another great day of snow was coming to an end. We all had a good time on the snow, and nobody got hurt… although Dima did end up doing a nice faceplant in the snow while bombing down a hill.

On our way back we stopped at Round Table Pizza and had the best pizza EVER! It was a great ending to a great weekend.

In all, we had an awesome time on the first ever TMC snow trip. Every aspect of the trip went extremely smoothly and there were no major glitches at all. Stay tuned for TMC snow trip version 2.0!