A glorious two-day trip to Squaw Valley, my best "adult" skiing since the 80's! I rented some new-fangled contoured skis, which were about half the length of my old skis. On the first day I had some trouble with the bindings releasing prematurely. Really! On one run I came down fairly hard on top of a mogul. Both skis popped off, and I landed upright on my feet. My technique may not have been perfect, but last time I checked, skis weren't supposed to pop off until after you fall. So I took them back to the ski shop and the nice people at the Village Ski Loft in Incline Village confiscated them and gave me a nice pair of demos to use on the next day. Those didn't fall off.

Rony brought along her camera and GPS, so all the gear was in place to do some self-surveillance. The image below shows our tracks from two days of skiing superimposed over a view of Squaw Valley as seen from Google Earth. The red tracks are from the first day, when we skiied approximately from right to left. The blue tracks are from the second day when we skiied from left to right, and then back again.

The next image shows our elevation during the first day of skiing. I think it's fun to see the ups and downs of the day's runs. The first bump goes up to the top of Immigrant. Then the next two are warm-up runs on Shirley Lake. The three after that take us up to the top of Granite Chief. I think the next two are transitional lifts as we make our way to lunch and then back out again, followed by a run on Siberia and three runs on Headwall. That was it for the day. No legs left for KT.

It's also neat to see that we covered about 22 miles of distance during this short day of skiing. It was about the same distance to drive back to Incline Village at the end of the day, to the Albers' house on top of the hill.

On the second day we got a slightly earlier start, and instead of heading straight up to the top of the mountain, we started down at the bottom. On the first run we did a warmup down Red Dog, which used to be an expert run, but now has a nicely plowed blue diamond path down the mountain. Up the Red Dog lift again, but then down to the Squaw Creek lift. I don't think I've ever skied that one before. Then we cut across to our old friend Headwall where we skied three runs. In the morning the snow was still a little icy, so we tried to keep to runs that had some sun on them. The Sun Bowl, on the backside of Headwall, was perfect.

After lunch, we went over to Granite Chief for a couple of runs, which were great but we were saving our energy for KT-22. We made our way across the mountain and unsure of which way we wanted to ski down, missed all the open runs and ended up skiing down the Saddle. Then one outstanding run down the West Face followed by another run down the Saddle.

We covered an impressive 33 miles in this longer, but still not extreme day of skiing. We're not sure whether the GPS records vertical and horizontal distance, or horizontal distance only. I'd guess that a distance calculation would only use the positional coordinates and not the altitude, but that's just a guess.

Here's a view of some very nice looking bumps on one of the runs down from Headwall. You can see Lake Tahoe in the background, and some very short skis on my feet. It turns out that the moguls these days are shorter than they used to be, so you actually need the shorter skis just to fit between them. That's why my old skis didn't turn as well as I thought they should!

Here's Rony demonstrating how to make a view look good. This is probably the run before she went down an impressively steep and narrow couloir that I decided I'd leave for a future trip when my insurance is paid up.

And here we are showing off in front of the "Advanced Only" sign at the top of Headwall. I'm pretty sure they meant Advanced Age, but I could be wrong. Note the minimal layers of clothing needed on this nice warm day of almost spring skiing.