Bigsky, MT

After arriving home from Europe, I got to spend a day recovering from jetlag at our family friends the Kern’s house in Washington, DC. My dad flew in the day after me, and we hit the road hours after his wheels touched down. Two, 17 hour, speeding filled, days later we arrived in Bozeman, MT to race the FIS speed series at Big Sky. It was such a great time! The downside to always traveling the NORAM circuit is not being able to see many of my old friends that only do the FIS elite races, so I tried to make up for lost time while there. Sure was great to see them! I didn’t expect to score at all at these races, but was rather just looking for speed-training going into the NORAM speed-week in Aspen, CO. I came out with two 37’s in SG and four days of DH training before the biggest speed races of the year; couldn’t ask for more!   

Europe!

          I had a great two weeks of training in Europe. The snow was difficult to figure out (pretty peely and inconsistent) but still was well worth it. The schedule didn’t end up having as many starts as I would have liked, but I still got three GS starts and a ton of time on snow.

          I had forgotten how much I love everything over there! The little shops, the amazing food, the people, and basically the entire environment are just awesome and smile inspiring. Each day after training we would all go out free skiing as a group for a few hours; what a blast!! The Italians don’t seem to mind fast skiers like many American ski resorts do…  At home you blow by a group of beginners too close and you get reported to the ski patrol for being reckless, over there the entire group starts tucking and straight lining trying to keep up! However, they do mind people skiing the “off piste.” One afternoon we decided to hit up some cool looking powder lines just off the main trails. It wasn’t roped off so we figured it was fair game and sent it. We also figured that the man yelling at us at the bottom was congratulating us on some awesome skiing, and failed to notice the “Carbineri” patch on the back of his coat.  After asking for documents and lift tickets, he took us to the Police station on the top of the mountain and paced back and forth talking animatedly on his phone. After what seemed like an interminable amount of time he told us to stay on the groomers in the future and keep the speeds slow. I could swear he wanted to arrest the lot of us, but apparently I need work on my Italian hand signal diagnostics. Thank goodness they liked us there!