The Mt. Tahoma trail head is located in the middle of nowhere. As such it is advised that you have chains and be prepared to use them. The trail association is kind enough to post the phone number of the local tow service in case you decide that chains are for sissies. We opted to be sissies, we took the truck and had our trusty chains in the back seat, ready for use if deemed necessary. The fire road we were traveling didn't seem too bad, from the tracks in front of us it seemed that most other people did not have chains on their vehicles. Given this information we opted to leave our chains in the backseat. Bad idea!
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| chaining up |
We stopped at an intersection to look at a map and determine just where it was we were headed. When Matt put the car back into gear and hit the gas we proceeded to begin sliding towards a cliff edge. Better yet it was a gully that wasn't protected by trees. Nothing good would have come from sliding over it. Oh yes, I should mentioned that we were on a very steep mountain(ish) type road. Matt, being the calm, cool, collected individual that he is handled our predicament quite well. After watching his eyes bug out of his head there was a lot of gear shifting and gas stomping to try and angle ourselves away from our impeding doom. Since you are reading this it is apparent that he was a success. He was finally able to stop our slide at which point we put the chains on and made it to our destination without further excitement.
Skiing was fun. However, it was unlike any xc I have ever done. Michigan is fairly flat, these trails, not so much. We grinded uphill for a couple of miles on our skinny skis, had a snack, then turned around to ski back to our car. The uphill portion was good, talk about a workout, everything was burning. The downhill, well it wasn't very graceful, for either of us... I have never seen Matt fall on skis, I watched him bite it not once, but twice during the downhill. I also fell a number of times (no surprise), I even managed to twist my knee pretty good so it is now swollen and ugly looking.
What did I learn from our xc ski? 1) I need smaller boots, mine are just a bit too big and cause extreme discomfort when going downhill; and 2) I need to practice going downhill on skinny skis, we have the Hog Loppit coming up (30k xc ski race [mostly downhill]). I know that I am going to be a flailing, falling mess, but it should be fun. At least I won't be alone - one of our friends did it last year and commented on how people were constantly falling, I should fit right in!
Our drive home wasn't any less eventful that the drive to the trail. There are some pretty gnarly steep, twisty roads by Rainier. We were forced to turn around and backtrack to an alternate route due to an accident that had to road shut down. Our alternate route also provided to be a bit slick. We sat for a good 15 minutes while cars spun their tires trying to make it up inclines. The Washington road system just isn't set-up to handle snow/ice at the lower elevations.
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