Seth's snowboarding synopsis

20080206

Been a while again. I can see how it's hard to keep up with these things when you live a normal life. While I was traveling it was no problem to spend 2 hours in a library typing up an update, but now with the confines of normalcy (work and maybe a somewhat unnatural snowboarding habit), it's hard to want to spend the time typing. With normalcy there's also just not as much cool stuff to tell, but I'm sure my adoring audience enjoys my everyday life as much as my eccentricities, so I'll oblige them. I wrote a blog recently that I never published basically telling about a near death experience I had snowboarding. Maybe it wasn't near death, but it was near really painful. I was basically flying through the air about to hit a tree, but fortunately was able to bring my board up and deflect most of the blow. It was a pretty hard impact that I though broke my board in half, but “only” broke the metal edge. But I decided not to publish that one and will rather tell about the near death experience I had yesterday snowboarding. Again, it wasn't really near death, but I'm surprised I came away unscathed. Truly we are all immortal till God is through with us. As for the mishap, I have been progressing quite rapidly with my snowboarding skills and am now going through the terrain park hitting jumps. I started doing jumps a while back, but they were usually pretty small and with powder landings, so even if I busted it was completely safe. The terrain park is different though. It's pretty hard pack and the jumps are pretty big. Plus they are actually jumps while what I was doing before were mainly drops (a couple have been up to about 8 ft. drops which are pretty cool). Anyway, yesterday a friend and I went to the top of the mountain and made an out of bounds run through Rock Springs (great powder) all the way back down the mountain. He left after that, and I didn't want to go off on the mountain by myself in case something happened, so I decided to do laps through the terrain park. I made probably 7 or 8 runs getting some pretty big air (I imagine sometimes I land 15+ ft. from the point of take off) and landing all of them. The terrain park has landings for the jumps, so it's not a super hard landing (unless you totally clear the landing slope and hit on the flat ground which I did a couple times). Anyway, I was making my next to last run and hit the first three jumps better than I had at any point thus far. This in and of itself was good, but that meant for the 4^th jump (which is super steep, and I believe is designed for doing flips off of) I had more speed than I'd ever had on it before. Because it's so steep, it's hard to keep yourself centered over the board. I'd unconsciously been able to do this before, but this time when I went off the jump my board flew out from under me, and I pretty much went flying through the air kind of superman style. While sailing through the air I had a moment to think, “Hmm, this isn't good. I'm about to land head first. I hope this doesn't hurt too ba......” before I felt my face and helmet smash into the snow. I'm not sure I hit head first or if some other part of my body broke the fall first (one of my pinkies is hurting today, so maybe it hit first), but regardless, I hit pretty hard. I really don't think I would be writing this if I hadn't been wearing a helmet (not that I'd be dead, but I'd have at least a concussion for sure). I think I only hit part way on my helmet and rest on my goggles because I totally busted up the lenses. The bridge of my nose is a little bit sore as well and my cheek from where the goggles got mashed into them, but considering what happened, I must once again admit that I am incredibly blessed. Unfortunately no one saw it (or got it on video which would have been even better), so maybe it wasn't as bad as it seemed to me, but it's hard for me to imagine a worse way to land. Go off a jump and pretty much dive straight down. But if you have any fears, I am fine. Today I did the terrain park several more times (though I did purposefully avoid the 4^th jump) and everything was fine. I really want to get some pictures to send you all, so you can see what I'm doing. I'm also kind of wondering if I'm getting as much air as it seems. I've seen a lot of other guys much better than me go off and do tricks and stuff (which I'm not doing yet), but I don't think I've seen any get as much air as I get. Not that they couldn't do it, I'm sure they could, but they don't for whatever reason.

Well, I miss you all a ton. September may be the earliest I get to come visit, but any of you all are welcome out here. A friend of mine who owns a house said you can stay with them in their guest room, so the quality of my living accommodations that Josh mentioned shouldn't be a hindering factor.