ski patrol REsCue.

Vail, CO - DAY 1
December 18, 2010

The morning started off with an egg sandwich and Drew, Amy, Wes & I gearin' up for the 11,570 feet slopes of Vail.  A few hours of the Back Bowl and we headed in for lunch. Now, what we thought would be a short, 2 hour post-lunch quick mountain ski, turned into a scary ending. Amy and I sent the boys out to do their own thing, while we did ours - they weren't into terrorizing the double black diamonds that were closed off and being B/A like us. We studied the trail map on the way up 'perfecting a plan' to stay towards the right of the mountain, closest to Vail Cascade...Well, let's just say that when we got up to the mountain and headed down our planned trail, we saw a few black diamonds that weren't closed off and got a little lost.

Black diamond to black diamond led us to either going up hill to the left or up hill to the right - our only downhill choice was two double black diamonds:::that may have been closed off? We can't remember. And umm...closed off for good reason, possibly. Funny enough, the trail was named "BEEN THERE, DONE THAT". ha. Amy led, acting like she knew where she was going and we finally hit a point where there was nowhere to go and all we heard was water. We saw a chair lift to our left, but it was wayyyy too far away. And we saw a run to our right, but that was also far away and we'd have to cross the creek. Not to mention, it was 3:45 PM, the lifts and the mountain closes at 4:30 and that's just about the time it gets dark out too. NOT GOOD.

Thank goodness I had my cell phone. Ski Patrol needed to be notified and come find us. We waited for them for about a half hour - 2 guys and 1 girl followed our tracks from the directions we told them. It was a scary ride out of there. It was getting dark, we were riding along a ledge where there was a creek below us and we got to a point where we had to get some speed and hop the creek. Creek hoppin' & ski boot climbin' led us onto the main trail.

We could've gotten arrested or a huge fine, but the ski patrol was very generous and saved our butts from some tickets and only ended up rackin' up a little bar tab at VENDETTA'S (a local ski patrol hang out). The end of the night turned into history......