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Starting with Saturday, we woke up at 5am to a very rainy morning. Ed had drove out to my place from Riverside, Brandon and Art crashed over at the house. We left around 5, Hugo kept trying to sneak out of the house and into the car; so I had to squeeze out of my garage door while keeping him from bolting out; he’s remembering our early departure a few weeks ago up to Tahoe and thinks he’s gonna get another ride up to the mountains to play in the snow. The drive up was nice, I carried the chains I picked up and never used on the Tahoe trip; and figured that I would probably end up using them this time. When we got to about 5000 feet, we hit the chains checkpoint, so I pulled over and we put on the chains.<\/p>\n
I’m used to driving on chains as I used to have to use them on my old camry when I lived in Sac and went skiing almost every weekend; so I just end up passing everyone not used to driving in chains in the snow. I mean, for fuck’s sake, they’re running at 10-15 mph. Screw that, pushing it to 30 mph, woohoo, hot rodding the mini van. I did slip out here and there, but nothing that I’ve not experienced before; granted this was the first time I drove chains on a mini van, but it preformed just like my camry. We saw a Lexus spun out on the side of the road with the driver and passengers outside wondering what they could do. But for most of the trip up, it was early enough that traffic wasn’t an issue and most of the time, I was the only car on the roads.<\/p>\n
Reaching Big Bear, we stopped by McD for some breakfast, before heading up towards the resort.<\/p>\n I haven’t been here in a whole year and I completely missed my turn and ended up at Big Bear City, a good couple of miles away. Bear Mt resort was put into our respective gps’ and we turned around and headed up. We got there around 8, parked, geared up, and grabbed our lift tickets – Ed being the youngest of the group at 21 gets to take advantage of the young adult price, bastard; us old folks get full price, yay! We took the express (lift 9) and headed up to the top of the mountain on “goldmine mountain”. Bear Mtn Map reference<\/a> Our first run of the day was the black diamond; how else do you really expect us to warm up? It was snowing and windy, and at the top you really feel the strength of the storm. Visibility was rather crappy, and it was fairly difficult to discern the terrain until you get really close.<\/p>\n Here’s a quick vid of our first run with the four of us taking the run as a group.<\/p>\n<\/a>
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