i miss this, but winter's right around the corner!

Donner Ski Ranch.  Located in north Lake Tahoe, this small resort with its $20 lift tickets attracted the attention of my dad's money saving habits.  This was the place I first learned to snowboard with my $50 Big 5 board.  This year was my second year snowboarding, the second year coming to this resort.  We drove up to tahoe from LA, a 10 hour drive.  This year was the year that the local mountain, Mountain High was getting insane amounts of snow.

We stayed in Reno for the whole trip, driving to north Tahoe at 7 in the morning to satisfy the needs of my brother and I, two middle schoolers excited to snowboard for as long as we could.  The mountain road up gave us a lot of trouble with all the snow everywhere; thankfully we had a 4 wheel drive car.  By the time we had reached Donner Ski Ranch, we were in the middle of a blizzard.  I have no clue how we made it there alive, but it was white out conditions.  You couldn't see a thing!  The resort obviously didnt expect anyone to come out that day with the conditions as bad as they were; they were selling lift tickets for the full day for $4!!  After lots of arguing and whining with our parents, we both got lift tickets and were riding the lift up.  The conditions were scary.  We couldn't see anything more than 5 feet away and going up the lift I started having doubts about snowboarding that day.  As soon as I strapped in and took my first turn, all my doubts vanished.

There was so much snow, it was ridiculous.  Powder everywhere, the mountain was completely empty, and we were loving life.  The whole day we literally saw 2 other people on the slopes.  It was hands down the most fun day I had snowboarding.  I wasn't even that good; I had barely learned how to carve and was just riding down the slope.  But riding down the slope that day in those conditions was more fun than hitting jumps and rails.  I'd gladly give up a day in the park now for a day like that again.  That experience made me fall in love with snowboarding; without it, who knows if I would love the sport as much as I do today.