Home, sore, and happy!

Whoa, am I sore! After a great last week or so in Norway and six days in Switzerland, I'm back home in Squaw Valley, and it's been an epic two days of skiing powder. My legs, however, can't keep up--the amount of skiing you can squeeze in while spinning laps on KT-22 is like nothing else in the world, and after being away from it for a month, I'm feeling the burn. Heh, heh. But I like the burn, so it's ok! As of my last update, we were waiting for snow and then good weather in Norway. Snow, we got, and then finally it broke blue. Considering the rain crust that we knew was out there, and the light, cold snow that came in, we weren't expecting much--we thought we would just see slides everywhere. We couldn't believe our first run, then, when we got actual powder turns and slough, not slabs. You could still feel the bottom in places, but nothing like we had expected. We made a few tentative runs, and then got a little more ambitious, picking a run that was steeper and slightly bigger. I dropped in to gorgeous, blower pow, thinking that it was too good to be true; sure enough, when I approached the lip of a planned air, my skis started skidding on the ice underneath. I made a turn around the air, and instantly accelerated on the ice. I managed to scrub speed on a patch of nice snow, then back onto the ice, flying out to my exit point and just barely holding it together. And that's kind of how it went for the next few days--just when you got your confidence up and were feeling good and thought you had found good snow, you hit the crappy stuff, and then I would go back to being tentative again. So it was a challenge, finding the combo of good snow, good light, good terrain, and (for me) the right mentality to charge it....but overally, I think we did a good job of making the most of some variable conditions. At any rate, we had beautiful weather, and at one point, the boys built a sick gap jump and had a sunset session that was super impressive to watch--we flew out as it was getting dark and I felt so lucky just to be there. The sunrises and sunsets last for so long in Norway--you get nearly two hours (it felt like, I could be exaggerating) of hazy, soft, light, and somehow it just renders the mountains and fjords that much more spectacular.
We loaded up the rental van and charged back to Oslo--everyone else left on the 6th, leaving me a day of sightseeing and wandering around the city and checking out all of the fashionable Norwegians, a really cool castle, and H&M, of course (hee, hee--ladies, you know what I'm talking about!). It was off to Zurich on the 8th, to meet up with Kim Reichelm, Chris Davenport, and Shane McConkey for an event in St. Moritz with Barclays Bank that I was lucky enough to be invited to. Basically, we freeskiers, plus ski legends Franz Klammer, Marc Girardelli, and Franz Weber were there to ski with Barclays employees and their clients--it was extremely fancy and well planned--from champagne at lunch to being serenaded by Three Baritones in between courses at dinner one night. What?! I mean, this is ME that gets to do this?! Whoa. Crazy. But there's nothing like being in Squaw when it's dumping, and I think they've received something like 12 feet in the past two weeks, and it's nuts here; and, it's supposed to snow again tonight. We're due in Haines, AK, with Matchstick as soon as conditions improve there--until then, I'll be working on pushing through the soreness, and I'll be just smiling, huge.