Okay, here's the real stuff, the riding stories, what boarding memories are made of.
Last year was my most memorable season, for more than one reason. The first, it was my first full season , the other more important reasons, I'll tell about here.
Probably the most important, are the quality time and awesome days I had with my brother. It doesn't get any cooler than that.
Before I go any further, let me tell about my brother. Paul is one of those annoying little brothers, who can do everything better than me, in less than HALF the time. Now that's good and bad. The good outweighs the bad for sure, but there is some bad let me tell you!! I remember the time we were both headed for a 20ft. box. There's my style: Really cautious and careful, not too fast, centered over the board, technique el perfecto, heart pounding, fear of death, life passing before my eyes, etc. etc. Than there's Paul's style: Go for it. Period. So one day, I'm following about 25ft. behind him, and he's FLYING like a maniac towards this box. "Okay" I tell myself "I've done this before, I can keep up with him". So he does a simple 50-50, and goes flying over this box, promptly catches an edge and starts flipping like an acrobat on the snow. I don't really see much of this, because I've just landed on the box and am inadvertently transferring to a backside board slide... leaning back. So I temporarily join the acrobat team, and do one of those classic "litter the area with gear" things, and lay there panting, looking at Paul as we moan in a chorus "are you alright?!?"
As I say, it's usually good that he's better. There's always unspoken competitions going on. Racing to the bottom, going bigger with more style. At the snow vacation our whole family takes, Paul promptly started building a jump. It seemed the run in was about 20 ft. straight down, and the jump was about 3 ft. straight up (it seemed at least). He promptly started work on his 360's.....

I don't remember if he ever landed any, I just know the flat landings got harder and harder as the soft stuff compressed to uhh, not so soft stuff.
At Squaw Valley, we were hitting a small step down. I started attempting a bigger one nearby, with visions of impressing him once I had it dialed. After several shots (sketchy but successful), I told him I had cleared it. "That big one?" "yeah" "really?!" and off he goes, straight-lines it, effortless air, lands perfectly and cruses away !
A group of us had a humours crash, or at least a skier in the group had the crash. Four of us were taking a break on the side of a blue run (we weren't too good yet, as you'll see). I was pretty tired, and was standing and chatting when the new skier in our group, apparently wanted to come and take a break too, but couldn't remember how to stop his 215 lbs. from coming right at us. None of us really saw him until he bulldozed right through the middle of us, flattening one, and clipping me and another who also went to instant horizontal position. He gracefully (not )crashed behind us, the others stayed put, but I promptly began sliding down the hill on my back, head first. For the life of me I couldn't stop, get up, or do anything for about 150 ft. Those were the days. A shallow blue was okay, but a steep blue? I would be sure it was a black till checked the trail map!
There are a ton of late teens at our church. One kid (David) was part of our riding group from the start, but that was bound to grow. Especially since my family has a 15 passenger van at my disposal. I would charge 5-8 bucks each for gas, and we would be off. They would get picked up early in the morning, they would usually sleep over at Davids house, and usually had stayed up till 1 a.m. or something crazy. On one of these trips, we were headed for a lesser known place (Homewood), that usually is wide open, nearly a ghost town sometimes. Well, Mother Nature decided to let us have it this time. The going was slow, and Homewood is further away anyway. We were required to stop and put on our chains, which reduced us to 25mph (at least according to 'manufactures recommendations' ). In reality, it only slowed me to about 45 or so, at least until the right spider chain broke from the overdose of speed. We had to stop again and take it off, and continue at about 30 or so. Later, we stopped and took the other one off, and promptly got on a road that was an inch thick with solid ice.
Nobody else had chains on, so I didn't bother to stop for them either. We got a little drifting action going at one point, but we were going really slow. Besides, it was like 9:46, the lifts had opened 45 minutes ago.
Fast forward 45 minutes.
We finally made it, got our stuff on, some of the kids hit the rental shop, and we finally caught the first lift at a little after 10:30.
It was worth it.
Powder everywhere!!
The riding was incredible, but of course (as you can see) the riders wern't particularly. You won't catch us on any videos, not winning any competitions or anything, but we're a bunch of kids having the most killer time of our lives, with each other, just shredding it to the best of our ability. One of the Kids is a Cancer survivor. I think he's now a boarding survivor too! Here's a shot of him, pre-head landing (nearly at least).
He's now fighting the cancer again, but is doing well and he keeps telling me "I'm ready to go in January, after my Chemo" He's doing well Thank the Lord.
We cruised the groomers, I foolishly raced David. He's been on snow since he was a wee kid, so he's really good. I didn't die, but nearly (my board is a 146 noodle). We of course hit the parks, and all did our best to out do each other. Paul landed a gorgeous 360 and made David all green with envy.
The scenery was fab as of course, nearly a stones throw from Tahoe.
The day finished uneventfully, lot's of goofing off, having fun like boarding's supposed to be, with some unusual twists as well...
I tell them they can't konk out on the way home, they've got to talk to me the whole way home to keep me awake.
Those are the Riding stories that stick in my mind. Snowboarding at it's finest, at least at our finest, and that's what counts!