Black Diamonds UPHILL

Last Saturday Amy and I and some friends (Heather and Catherine) went cross-country skiing!! It was THE perfect day!! Sunshine, warm weather, LOTS of snow... and we found the mecca of trails!! We usually go cross-country skiing at Snow Basin. We always go on the same trail, but knew there were more trails in the area, we just didn't know where the trails were. We found the whole HIVE of them Saturday!! There were so many we could hardly choose which trails to follow! Because we've always skied the same trail it never occurred to us that cross-country trails (like downhill trails) might have different ratings of expertise! It wasn't until we were staring up at a very, very steep hill that we realized we might be in over our heads! But we weren't to give up... so we crawled up the steep hill! It took quite a while for us to pull ourselves up the hill! There was a lot of excitement as one of us would start sliding backwards down the hill and start pulling others down with them! Amy ended up taking off her skis and tried clawing her way up the mountain carrying all her gear! Heather and I tried putting our ski-poles behind our skis on the hill to HELP stop us from sliding back down too far! It was quite the adventure! We had a lot of good laughs and even starting laughing so hard we were probably close to hysterics! You just can't help but laugh and have a good time out in the sunshine! After we FINALLY made it up the hill and forged our own trail (over a fire hydrant) back to the lodge we found a trail map and discovered the hill we had climbed up was a black diamond on the cross-country trail list! How cool are we! We are practically expert level skiers!!