Howelsen Hill Ski Race.

Before I left for SIA, there was a ski race at Howelsen Hill at which I volunteered. I had heard you would get free passes to Steamboat, and I have a couple friends coming to visit for spring break so I wanted to hook them up with passes.

The day started crazy early since I was told to be at the hill at 7:30am. Thankfully, Tyler let me borrow his car so I didn't have to get up even earlier to catch the bus. This is a picture from inside the lodge at 7:30am looking up the race course, followed by a shot of the empty lodge since I was pretty much one of the first ones there before all the racers started showing up.

Once more people started showing up, along with the other volunteers, we got together to go over our duties for the day. We were going to be gatekeepers, which meant we would have to watch a certain section of gates and mark on our gatekeeper sheets if a skier missed a gate and didn't hike up and go through it properly in case there were any disputes over times. It was a simple enough job, but the weather decided not to cooperate.

We headed out to our posts along the course. I was the fourth one down and had to watch five gates. We unfortunately had to use the T-Bar to get up the hill, which I personally hate and are usually pretty awful for snowboarders. Once we were in our spots and were just standing around waiting for racers was when I realized just how freezing cold out it was. The wind was blowing like crazy, it was snowing, and there was no sun to be found. I'm not even sure how long we were outside, but to give you an idea, we had to watch 150 racers between the men and women, and that was only their first run. Thankfully CMC hooked us up with bag lunches after the first runs while we warmed up before the second ones.

Thankfully the second runs didn't take as long since some people got eliminated, although one of the women actually got pretty seriously injured, so that delayed things a bit, but thankfully she ended up ok. It felt especially long for us gatekeepers since we had no idea what was going on from our spots on the course. The following picture is the pit I dug to help block the crazy amounts of wind. Pretty much all the gatekeepers built something similar to this to make it through the race.
So around 3pm, the race was finally over, all us gatekeepers strapped in, and cruised down to the lodge to warm up again. I honestly couldn't even tell you the results since as soon as the last racer was done we were out of there. As rough as the day was, we were all super stoked when we found out we were going to get two day passes to Steamboat for the one day of work since the conditions were so awful and they were so grateful for volunteers, so my friends better be grateful for the passes. With that said, it was pretty interesting being up close and personal to the race, since I've only ever seen races on TV. Plus Bacon is a ski racer and I really didn't know very much at all about racing before doing this, so it was cool to learn. I'll leave you with this little video I put together of some of the racers and to give you an idea of the cold windy conditions. Peace.

P.S. For you loyal followers of Big Mac Mondays, my camera died on Monday when I was going to film, and then I forgot to bring it today, so I plan on filming tomorrow and throwing an edit together, so keep checking back for it.