The snow is really stacking up. At Mt. Hood Meadows ski resort they report 204″ to 214″ of consolidated base. At Mt. Hood Meadows it took a season total of 640 inches of snow fall. You can see what the road to the resort looks like in the last image.

Now I’m in New York. I will be blogging about AIPAD, Whitney Biennial 2008, Chelsea, and more this weekend and next. I can’t wait to see some of my photographer friends at AIPAD. For friends that I haven’t got a hold or don’t know your plans, drop me an email or comment if you are in New York and we can get together.

This was not a case of life imitating art or art imitating life. it was a case of art taking me to life in the mountains. Yes!

It was a sunny nice day to drive up and back. Though given the tiny patch of ice and how the car responded, I’m not sure that I’ll be taking it up on days when it is snowing. Three days of non-stop sunshine certainly made the roads pretty clear on the way up and down.

I noticed several taking photos of the car either on the drive or in the lot. Next time I’ll have my camera ready so I can take photos of those taking photos.

I had several interesting conversations throughout the day riding the lifts. Some of the topics were of course the weather and skiing but also conversations about Kashmir, K2, walk-abouts, Ghana, and many other things. I find Oregonians do a lot of interesting things. You can hear all about it once you get them talking.

The skiing was lots of fun throughout the day. The morning started a bit firm (icy) in the morning. So I stayed on the cord and ripped. After the Sun and warmth worked its magic the off-piste softened up. What followed were lots of shots down 4-bowl, powder keg, 1.5 bowl and many others.

They never managed to open up Heather Canyon due to A-Zone being just boilerplate ice all day. I had really hoped they would open it up so I could repeat some runs down the steepest part of pea-gravel ridge. Saturday, my buddy Dave and I hit it and the sun-bake on it was fantastic! Dave even said it was his best run of the year. Several weeks ago he went heli skiing at Kicking Horse so you know how sweet it was!

I was skiing with my buddy Dave. Years before we met with both saw a lot of the same music. Back in ’84 we both saw a monumental show in two different cities. He saw it in the twin cities and at C.O.D’s in Chicago I saw Naked Raygun, Husker Du, Effigies, and The Dead Kennedys. Wow, that was an amazing show! All of these bands were great then and would later have an amazing amount of influence.

How does have anything to do with a weekend of skiing? Well it means we both got up early and missed the Naked Raygun show at Dante’s this past Saturday night. Another buddy Rich blogged about it before the show in “Chicago Punks in Portland”.  I’m hoping he’ll post a review and some pics. Check for it in the next week at earthpatrolmedia.com.

For no particular reason we gave Dave’s car a mohawk. The mohawk lasted down the mountain and way past Sandy Oregon.

The ski day awesome! The 50+ winds never quite materialized and it snowed hard all day. The crowds basically left early due to either getting quickly tired in the early season or too much storm. During the course of the day the wind and snow filled in many of the tracks in what we call “re-pow”.

The self portrait below shows my skis and pants. Unfortunately my ski pants hold snow better than any material I’ve ever known, but at least they are dry and warm. That buildup isn’t from falling but from lots of runs down off-piste runs.

For those that need links to various forecasts and geographic locations of some resorts (Oregon, Whistler, Fernie, Squaw,…) you can find them at: http://www.bradcarlile.com/travel/ski.html