Ski Time!

Snowbird opened earlier than planned this year, which was awesome for me since I'm scheduled to have surgery this week. I got to ski both days this weekend and felt much stronger than I have in a while. The visibility up at Snowbird was pretty questionable yesterday, particularly since they had enough snow machines running to consistently create clouds of snow that iced up my goggles. That said, the snow was surprisingly consistent, so I ended up rocketing around and just trusting that my feet would cooperate. (They did.) The whole experience was so exhilarating for a couple reasons. First, I am firmly convinced that merely being outside in the mountains is good for my soul. This was my first trip up Little Cottonwood Canyon in a while, and it provided a nice reminder of why this blog has its name. Second, fighting cancer and managing the side effects of ipilimumab amounts to spending a lot of time dealing with your own body causing problems and making you sick. There's something empowering about taking my uncooperative body and forcing it to carry out precision commands to go flying down the mountain. Every time I get to show that I'm still in charge I achieve a small victory.

I prefer to include photos in these posts, but all I have from skiing Saturday is a hazy cell phone pic looking across Big Emma from about half way up Gadzoom. Still very pretty though: