The day to day...

Not too much has been going on around here lately, hence the lack of blog posts. Laura and I have been working 40 hour weeks, on top of enjoying the benefits of our jobs and new home. Now that we are in the routine of work, we are finding ourselves happier when at our jobs, and less tired when we get home. One thing is for sure, working outside and seeing a beautiful sunrise every morning NEVER gets old. This is probably the first job I have ever had where I can't help but smile when I show up for work. Here are some various pictures I have taken over the past couple of weeks:

Inversion day view from the top of the gondola about two weeks ago.

Sunrise behind Sleeping Indian, I took this picture standing right under my chair lift.

The sunrise this morning from the top of the gondola. Casper and Thunder lifties all meet here every morning before heading to our lifts.

I had to mess with this picture a lot to make it not look really blurry. I took it very hastily because this HUGE moose came running out of the woods towards our lift. The controls in front of the snow mobile are the ones we stand at all day, just to give you an idea of how 'in the wild' we are when we work!

The Clipboard in the Casper Lift top shack, I drew this over time in various phases of boredom :P

I took this picture during a drive through Grand Teton National Park with my dad.

Laura and I were hoping to get some good action shots on the mountain this week, but it's not looking like we will get a lot of snow in the next couple of days. Hopefully we will get a freak storm out of nowhere...which thankfully seems to happen pretty often around here...so stayed tuned for those.

I can't believe that the first month of the new year is already over, and I'm already noticing that this season is flying by. Laura worked with me at Casper today, so we decided to take some pictures of us bumping chairs, here they are:

I told these people, "Turn around and smile at the camera, I'm gonna send this to my mom!". They thought it was hilarious, and as you can see they were good sports!

In February, Laura's cousin and fiance are coming to visit as well as some more of our friends from college. I'm sure we will have a great time having them stay with us, we loving having guests! On another note, we set the new record for ski days this month, but hopefully we will break it in February!

Big Lie, MT...

A lot of people around here somewhat jokingly refer to Big Sky, MT as 'Big Lie' ...and now my friends and I see why! We had a great time in Big Sky, but the mountain is definitely not all its talked up to be...add in the fact that there were rocks EVERYWHERE even after two great powder days, and we all had something to whine about given that we just left Jackson Hole to ski somewhere else. This aside, not working for almost two weeks, spending time with some good friends I haven't seen in a while, and relaxing in a place that wasn't mine all added up to a week that I thoroughly enjoyed.

The highest point at Big Sky, lone peak.

Although the skiing wasn't fantastic, there was one run a couple of us did that was really fun. On the inside of the lone peak is an area called the pinnacles, where there are ski-able chutes between huge rock spires. A couple of us decided it would be pretty cool to ski through them, so we went for it. At one point, the space for you to ski through was only about 2 feet wide, so it got pretty intense! You can see the route we took in the last photo below.

View of the pinnacles.

Me climbing above the pinnacles to spot our decent.

Shot from below the chute, the dot right below the spires is my friend Brandon.

Here is the route we took.

Laura and I also felt good because we had over a dozen people from Snowcats come up to us and tell us that the club was ssssoooooooo unorganized this year, and that we had done a much better job running it the previous year. We kind of knew this was true anyways, but its good to hear it from unbiased people out of the blue. Here are some more random pics from the trip...this was the first year I have been on a Snowcats trip and not taken close to 300 pictures haha. (A couple of the following pictures were taken by my friend Stephen Salome)

Our ski-in/ski-out condos.

Lone peak.

The lone peak tram-dola. (We won't call it a tram because its pathetic compared to JH's tram :P)

It sucked having to say goodbye to all of our friends after such a great vacation. On top of that I was pretty much dreading going back to work after being a bum for so long. I was NOT looking forward to waking up at 5:30am that first day back, but I was quickly reminded how sweet my job is. I got to the top of the gondola in the morning, looked out at the horizon, and took a deep sigh of relief...

Avalanches suck...

Things at Jackson Hole haven't been as carefree and positive as usual this past week. The huge amount of snow we got Christmas week combined with a bad layer of snow that we got in November has caused avalanche conditions to become very dangerous. If you haven't heard yet, we had someone die in an avalanche inside the ski resort on December 27th. The ski patrol found him and dug him out in 7 minutes... but it was already too late. This was only the second in-bounds avalanche death at JHMR since 1966.

Image from Jhnewsandguide.com

Just a few days later, an avalanche did $1,000,000 worth of damage on the Bridger Restaurant at the top of the gondola.

Images from Jhunderground.com

Another very large avalanche ripped down Laramie bowl and took its snow cover down to almost rock, in the picture below you can see how huge the crown is by comparing it to the size of the ski patrollers.


On a positive note, it has definitely made everyone more aware of the danger our sport entails. Laura and I both got avalanche beacons and now wear them to work everyday, and apparently all the ski shops in town are sold out. Conditions have gotten a lot safer as the week went on, but I think everyone in Jackson Hole will be extra careful for a long time.

On December 30th, my parents left to go home to Kentucky, and that afternoon some of our college ski club friends arrived. They skied with us a couple of days this week, and helped us bring in the new year!


Currently we are all in Big Sky, MT for the UK Snowcats Ski trip. It will definitely be nice to take a week off from work and ski with some old friends... living in a niiiiiiice ski-in/ski-out condo is a plus too! :D

I will post some pictures from Big Sky sometime this week! Hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Years!