Day 50 - Saturday Mar. 31 - Blog Contest Winner

I decided some time ago that I would reward my most loyal blog reader by taking them to Snowbird for a day of fun in the sun with me. Today was that day, and the winner is... Jimmy Bunting! Jimmy and I were mission companions for a week while serving in Sherman, TX. We got along quite well while out there, but since he lives in California and I live here in Zion, we have not been able to spend any time together since. When I started this blog I sent out an email to those of you whom I have your address just giving you a heads up about it. Jimmy was one of these who received this email and he actually reads it! Many of you are even featured in the blog and you don't read it. Well, today is Jimmy's turn to be featured in the blog and to read it. He and his friend, Kevin, came over to my house around 9:30 or so (they were a little later than our planned departure time of 8:30). We packed up my Civic and made our way up to Snowbird. We listened to some live Phish on the drive and all were edified and uplifted. I got them each a half price pass and we began to ski. We started with just some warm-up laps on Gadzoom. We then met another friend of theirs named Peter who was there with a couple buddies of his own. They kind of seemed to be satisfied with just looping the same damn run over and over so we left them behind and went over to Gad 2. As mentioned before, Jimmy is from California. He does not exactly have the same opportunities to ski as I. Knowing this to be the case, I thought I would still ski whatever I wanted and just see if I could push him a little. I am sure at times he was not super stoked on what we were skiing, but he generally seemed to be having a good time. We then decided to keep making our way around the resort to ski all sorts of terrain. We went to the Snowbird Center for lunch and the chick in General Gritts gave me a hard time for wanting to use my employee discount for their food! This was the first time this had ever happened. I am happy to say, though, that I was able to talk her into it. Yes, I have still got it. We then went up Peruvian and through the tunnel into Mineral Basin. We skied a few runs over there amidst all the wind and crappiness that comes along with skiing in Mineral, then made our way back over to Little Cloud. We were able to find some soft crud dropping in from the Road to Provo. This was good enough that we decided it would be worth doing again. So we did. We skied relatively the same line and experienced an equal measure of enjoyment. Check out this video of Jimmy shredding it up (sorry, I still haven't figured out how to simply put the video within the post itself). In order for me to be back in time to shower, change, and stuff before conference we then skied our way out to the car. We had a good day. The snow was pretty soft considering it is spring. We found some decent crud occasionally and we had good conversation for the whole of the day. Jimmy seemed to come up with a different excuse for his average performance every few minutes. But we all know the real story - he was just toning it down in order to boost my confidence as a skier. That's why I like this guy. He is always looking out for the little people (and compared to him I am very little).