Neither Rain Nor Sleet Nor Snow Nor Gloom of Night.

Today was another epic endeavor up the snow covered roads of Buff Pass for a sick Sunday session, except this time, Buff Pass tried to stop us.

It all started off a little later than usual when my friend Bagel and I were just hanging out and he had the idea to go snowboard. Naturally, I agreed. Very soon after that, our friend Ben called before we could even talk to him, asking if we wanted to go ride at Buff. Naturally, we agreed.

After getting all our gear together, we hopped into Ben's Nissan Xterra and headed out. In retrospect, the initial conversation about how Ben still had his summer tires on should've been a hint as to what lay ahead, but at the time, we didn't even think of it.

Everything went pretty smoothly like it does for awhile up Buff, but then we started getting into the snowy parts around the first gate. We were slipping and sliding a little but nothing to scary, until we came around a corner. There on the side of the road was a silver SUV that had slid off the road and down a small ditch where it had gotten lodged on some trees. Thankfully we didn't know the people whose car it was, but it was still pretty scary to see that it had happened to a car not much different than ours.

We continued on up the road where we passed some friends who were also heading up, unfortunately after we did so is when things went bad. We came to a point in the road where there was a pretty wide and deep hole that for some reason wasn't frozen and was full of mud. Ben decided to go to the right side of hole where there was a bit of room, but also a bit of a ditch. He ended up going down into it with just his left two tires so we thought we'd be fine getting out. This turned out to be wrong.

Ben pulled back and forth ac couple times, and it looked like we were getting close to getting out when we noticed we were slipping a little more than before. We got out to see what was going on when we realized the problem; the front left tire was completely flat. Luckily, since we had just based some other friends, when they caught up to us, we were able to attach a rope to their tail hitch and to Ben's front frame, so we got pulled out... but now we had a flat tire on our hands.

Lucky for us again, Ben came prepared and had a spare tire and the tools to change it in his car. After moving to the side of the road we proceeded to figure out just what we were doing, since none of us have ever had to change a tire before. Once again, Ben was prepared and had the manual in the glove box, so everything went surprisingly well.

All the while, Bagel had been eyeing this rock drop on the side of the road where we had pulled off. It has snowed all day yesterday and a little over night, so there was some nice fresh powder on the run. After scoping it out, building a little lip, and checking speed, Bagel dropped in a hit the gap with perfect speed. I actually got it on video on Ben's phone, so as soon as I get it, I'll try to figure out how to put it on here. Needless to say, it was sick way to get back into the snowboarding vibe after this little setback.

The rest of the ride went off without a hitch and we ended up having a sick session. Up at Buff, there were two new kickers along with the rails that are still up there. A bunch of people even hiked a long ways up to take some powder runs.

Thankfully the ride down went just fine with a couple scares of sliding off the road, but we made it down in one piece. This ended up being the craziest trip up Buff I think we've ever had, but we love snowboarding and skiing, so no flat tire or a couple close calls are going to keep us from riding.