Confidence and the send

Any skiier can tell you the importance of leaning downhill and staying out of the backseat. From a skiing perspective, it means that since your center of mass is more forward, you can drive energy into your boots - your primary source of contact with your skis - allowing you to apply more force and therefore control yourself on your skis better.

It's one of the first real "blocks" of skiing in my mind, where being scared of fully putting your weight downhill locks away a whole world of skiing. But even though it rationally makes sense (I can draw you the free-body diagrams and everything), it's hard to lean towards what literally looks like certain death.

It's also a pretty good metaphor for life. I feel like a better author could write a book on that metaphor, but I'll keep it to this blog post. A lot of times in life, I think there's situations where the fear of doing something can be a sufficiently strong barrier to you getting to a better place. Without overcoming that fear, you're limited to a subset of possibilities, any one of which has the possibility of making you happier. As with everything, it's not a binary of all things I fear = something that will improve my life (jumping out of a plane without a parachute probably won't make you happy for more than a couple minutes). Skiing is a helpful metaphor just in how clearly this association is shown, where ideally you shift your weight straight down the fall line, but that's the vector that's the scariest.

All that to say I was definitely leaning towards some scary-ass fall lines today off of High Traverse and Supreme. The trees up top were pretty sick, and there were some great powder stashes in Catherine's and Supreme Bowl, but the base is still being built (a rock every once in a while reminds me of what year it is). On my first run off of High Traverse, I got in a bit too far over my head and was literally on the edge of a cliff, with some rocks all throughout the only reasonable line.

Made the mistake of taking off my skis to "save them" from the rocks and spent 45m on my ass trying not to fall down a cliff.

Even then, it was fun.

Enjoyed the rest of the day and actually found some fresh pow at the very beginning of High Traverse that led to some great trees before the angle station. Shit was a bit rockier after the angle station so ripped a cruiser on my two-skip. I then had a clean setup with the car and camping chair I bought off marketplace