Bunny to Black

The Mooney we flew on a company offsite(on the way to Truckee-Squaw)

Inside the 4-seater Mooney

Beautiful Sierras

Me doing parallel turns

Our cabin on one of our trips to Tahoe

The title describes my journey as I began to ski for the first time since 2007. What a season! Here I am - a strong intermediate skier, a confidence acquired after 15 days of skiing this year at 6 different resorts ranging from Northstar, Homewood and Squaw in the North Lake Tahoe area to Kirkwood, Sierra-At-Tahoe and Heavenly in the South Lake region.

It has been a great learning experience. One might think that Skiing involves just sliding down a hill, but as I studied more about skiing, I began to understand the limitless expanse of skiing -- the varied skiing techniques, the differing terrain, weather conditions, difficulty levels, degree of gradient, or different surface conditions such as moguls, powder, icy, corn snow, slushy etc.

After graduating the green slopes, it was an absolute delight to tear into the long broad intermediate/blue slopes. These cruisers are an absolute favourite of mine, as they are long, steep and broad that enables me to turn at ease. Some of my favourite runs have been: West Bowl at Sierra, Shirley Lake at Squaw, Bonanza and High Grade at Homewood, Bark Shanty/Juniper/Whiskey area in Kirkwood and Meteor and Comet runs at Heavenly.

Having been comfortable on intermediate slopes, I began to venture into some of the tougher black diamond slopes. Some of the blacks that I tried were the Siberia Bowl at Squaw and Upper Zachary at Kirkwood. Skiing blacks can be tough. They tend to be really steep and it takes some courage to shake off the initial chills and jump in. The presence of bumps along the slopes makes it much harder. These ventures really exposed my shortcomings in technique as a skier, but made me determined to really "learn" skiing. I have now begun to work on the art of carved turns, an elusive technique for most intermediates. The more natural way to ski would seem like using the flat skis on snow, but carved turns requires us to tip the skis on their edges and achieve a certain degree of edge control. With sufficient angulation of the body, the skis tips on their edge, and the body's weight pushes the centre of the ski down, so these parabolic shaped skiis carve their way into the turn. Sounds simple, but has been a difficult skill to acquire.

Many experts suggest that beginners should be taught parallel/carved turns right away as that will prevent them from learning such bad techniques as wedge turns. But I felt that wedge and stem-christie turns, bad as they might be, provided me with a defensive platform and kept me interested in skiing. As I learn to use parallel/carved turns and graduate into tougher terrain, it is comforting to know that I have a stem christie to fall back on for tougher terrain.

Although this has been a great skiing season, I am sad that it is coming to an end with the advent of summer. I am already looking forward to the 2010 season (some 7-8 months away) as I aim to take my skiing to the next level.