2006 - The Year to Ski

For Christmas, the boys (Bryson (9), Garrett(6), Tanner(4) & Paul) all received ski gear and ski passes at Park City. Park City has a program where all children six and under get a free season pass and elementary age children get a season pass for $150. So, I purchased a 10-day locals pass for myself, we got everyone gear for Christmas, and our Saturday's are now consumed. We are having a blast!

There is a newly married couple living in the Love Shack (Cache and Stacy Ferguson). Cache is a full time student and was a ski instructor at Deer Valley for a while and, in exchange for a ski pass and a nominal hourly rate, he has agreed to teach all of the young uns this year. This is Garrett and Tanner's (and Ritchie Heywood's) first year and they are doing terrific! Here we have stopped for a hot chocolate break.

Our first day out was very wet and cold. We figured, heck if they can go on a day when the weather sucks, they'll love it on a good day. We were right!
Bryson has been taking off with the Heywood cousins (they have become the JR Smith ski team) who are a bunch of skiing fools and speed demons. These kids don't want to go on the 'Green' anymore and much prefer the Blue and increasingly more difficult stuff. Here are the older cousins on the ski lift together.

Angela felt like she should start taking lessons too (seeing as how she has never skied before). She signed up to go skiing with a couple of lady's from the ward at Sundance every Thursday for 2 hours. Never having skied, she didn't know any better when she inadvertently signed up for an advanced freestyle lesson. Here she is on her second day. I am kind of jealous, it took me years before I could do that. Angela is quite the athlete!

Angela's side note: I was wondering if learning to ski was going to be worth my time and money, but after Tanner's comment last night, I knew I made the right choice. While putting the boys to bed last night I asked the boys, "What was your favorite part of the day? And what was your least favorite part of the day?" All of them agreed that skiing was their favorite part. Then Tanner said, "Mommy what was your favorite part? I know, it was cooking dinner for us while we were skiing!" Then when I asked them what was their least favorite part of the day, they all said that it was eating the soup (tortilla soup with zuchinni and tomatoes) that I made for dinner. I knew that I had made the right choice to start skiing!