If anyone has been living under a rock lately the Pacific Northwest has been getting dumped on! Stevens Pass has received 29″ in that last 48 hours, Crystal has received 54″ in the last 72 hours, Snoqualmie Pass has received 24″ in the last 48.  I don’t even remember my last powder day before this series of stores hit.

A group of friends and myself decided that Presidents Day would be a great day to go ride some fresh pow. So we drove up to Crystal Mountain full of excited and ready for a full day of snowboarding. We had timed it perfectly to get up to the top just a little before open (9am). We about 7 miles from the summit, traffic stopped.

We had known that the power went out before we headed up the mountain, but considering it’s a mountain resort that operates because of winter storms we figured they would have a couple back-up plans. And they did. What we didn’t know is that the fury of this particular winter storm, with all of it’s white fluffy glory, also knocked down some trees and took out the power lines to the generator, and they were completely out of service for the day and CLOSED. (We got this news from people who had already turned around on the mountain.)

So we turn around after sitting in line for an hour and a half. I was convinced it couldn’t be true and that we should wait to hear it from someone official looking. Some would call it denial, I call it wishful thinking. We turn to mae our way down the mountain and we are all desperately trying to call the number for the mountain to make sure it’s really closed.Out of four of us we had a pretty good shot at getting through as one had a Sprint phone (me), AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile (which never got service).

My phone finally makes the call I ask if the mountain is closed and before the lovely attendant can answer I hear beep beep beep look down at my phone “call lost.” Damn it. We keep trying to get through and we finally do and low and behold they are closed for the entire day. New game plan, we will go to White Pass.

Only the way to White Pass was the same way to Crystal, that now had physical road blocks and hours of traffic. So we tried to re-route it but that would take 3 1/2 hours. Snoqualmie was only an hour away, so we decided to go there only to realize that I-90, the only road to the resort, had been shut down for a day. Great, no pow day for us. So we switched our focus to food (I have my priorities straight snowboarding first then food).

As we ordered breakfast around 11 at Charlie’s Cafe we realized the pass was supposed to open up at 11:30! So we impatiently waited for our food, inhaled it as quickly as possible, and them mobbed our way up to Snoqualmie. We made it just in time for the 1-5pm ticket prices and got in our pow day. We earned those runs and had an amazing day. I will be dreaming of surfing the great white north mountains for months now.

As for how to wake up for these amazing powder days I have a few suggestions. As I am getting older my body feels things a little more intensely, granted I am only 24 but I play hard. But I have realized that a little strength training, warm-up, and some deep stretching do the trick to keep my body feeling young and strong. I started with the yoga link below and added some of my own deep stretches.

After warming up with some yoga I did

– 10 Mountain Climbers

– 10 V-ups

– 10 Squats

– 10 push-ups

– Happy Baby Pose for 30 seconds (Lay on your back, bring your legs up, bend the knees to 90 degree angles, grab your feet, and side to side)

– And did the stretches from the video for longer amounts of time.

I hope you all enjoy this amazing February we are having in the mountains.