The journey of the cloud riders began at quite an early hour that day. As people were returning from the bar or going to bed, my boy Brian and I were waking up and hittin' the highway. I had returned from New England just hours earlier by plane, so getting out of a warm bed was tough, but the thought of 3 feet (!) of fresh pow made it easy as voting for education bond referendums on the local ballot.
I rendezvoused with Brian on the way to Canaan Valley, we jammed hard and snow surfed in the Volvo:
The video doesn't show it, but there was a solid rooster tail of snow billowing off the roof of the car when I steered into the plowed, fluffy drift briefly. The residual on the hood made it hard to see! We stopped for a moment to gaze at this awe-inspiring drift, we estimated 20+ feet tall!
The drive itself was almost as awesome as the skiing, the MD highway department was using some big dawg machinery, that thing cuts a swath 6 feet by 9 feet!
On the way into Whitegrass we got our car stuck in a drift- even with chains on! During the process we met some cool folks , one fella named Christian from the Air Force joined us for the day. Its so neat when people band together in a crisis. He was a real dude who had just spent a bunch of time in Alaska, of course skiing on the teles up there. Despite his first time to Whitegrass, he was just as stoked as us to be in WV and he did a superb job helping us break trail. You can't tell from the photo, but at one point his upper chest plowed through pow- and he is 6.5 feet tall!
I really can't put together the words to describe the skiing itself, it was so magical it pretty much changed my life. Now I can see why people drop out of school, live like a dirt bag and relentlessly pursue pow. Brian can speak to this pretty effectively, he got his face pretty darn soiled:
Of course it goes without saying the deeper the snow the bigger the bliss, and there is NO such thing as too much snow in a winter wonderland!
We discovered a true local gem of a powder stash, an entire pipeline of untouched, waist deep pow to plow! It was a sight to see and made the long-ass haul out there worth every breath! I mean whats there to say about wild and wonderful WV that hasn't already been said?
I think the next videos can practically speak for themselves, first Brian:Then me:
I literally had snow smack me IN THE FACE it was so deep in places, there is no other feeling like it. If skiing deep pow isn't heaven, I don't know what is. That day was a day that will go down in my memory as a turning point in my life, before I was a powder virgin, now I'm a Cloud Rider.
