Lost in Transportation

By face, I mean experience, and by ships, I mean Boeing 747s from Sydney to Vancouver (via Auckland). Anyway, I would have loved to have the photo that I mentally associate with this title, but cameras, like jobs, friends, and scruples, are unnecessary baggage on powder days.

So you're stuck with a description.

From the top:

His silver helmet is lightly crusted with snowflakes and his eyes peer out through orange lensed goggles. His nose and cheeks are bright red from a constant exposure to the cold, wind, and snow. His nose has been running and is crusted like a three year old's. The important thing is that he has a grin that rivals the Chesire Cat's.

Trust me, much better with a photo.

Today was quite possibly the most fun I have had in a long time. Actually, today was quite possibly one of the ten funnest days of my life (and definately into the top three of my adult life).

So what is this "powder" I speak of? Simply put, it's deposits of snow with a relatively high air content (the bigger a snowflake is the more air space there is between it and its buddies - which makes the snow lighter and softer). But that's like saying that Shakespear is just a whole bunch of words.

So I'm going to get all poetical (readers with a low tolerance of purple prose should probably go do something else about now).

Have you ever looked out the windows of an airplane and wondered what it would be like to play in the clouds? Not from a scientific point of view (it would be wet, cold, and rather brief before you plummeted to the earth in a screaming heap) but just to be able to enjoy their fluffiness.

Well, today was kind of like that. Whenever somebody turned in a particularly soft patch, a great big puff of snow came flying up behind them. One of the busier runs looked like a Napoleonic battlefield with puffs of cannon smoke everywhere. It was like the clouds decided to pay a brief visit to earth to show us all what it is like up there. Friction and other inconvenient laws of physics were temporarily suspended. You kind of float mostly on top of the snow and push it around with your board.

Ok, that's probably enough. It's the kind of feeling that drives people to fly around the world, spend foolish amounts of money, and put up with being cold. I'm not going to make a comparison with cocaine (the "other white powder" jokes are overdone) since I quite happily have no idea what Colombia's most infamous export feels like. I do know that the world snowboard guide website reports "no resorts found" for Columbia

So yeah, I had a fabulous day, and people who don't snowboard will have little idea why. People who do snowboard will be jealous. That's about it.