New Year Break

Happy New Year!

I hope the holiday season was enjoyable, sunny and gluttonous.

Since the last update fellow national team member Ben Griffin and I competed in 4 Miele Cup races in Canada. Ben achieved his goal of a podium, finishing 2nd in one of the GS races. I finished above my ranking in each race with a best position of 10th. The results were not spectacular, but each run is getting faster.

The race series finished just before Christmas and left us with a 9 day break to rest and recuperate, before meeting up again in LA on the 1st to fly here to Austria, where I am right now. Ben chose to head a few hours west in Canada to visit friends where he used to train as a teenager. That left me with the 2300km drive to return the van to Reno. Alone.

I stopped halfway through the trip for 5 days in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Now this is a holiday destination! The resort is in a spectacular range of the Rockies called the Tetons (roughly translated to tits). Their highest mountain is Grand Teton (big tit), sitting at 4,199m. Jackson is a quirky old west town now inhabited by a mirage of modern hippies living in a redneck area. The ski resort is world famous for steep slopes and deep powder. It lived up to its reputation and delivered some spectacular powder skiing.

After this I drove the van back across the Nevada deserts to Lake Tahoe, California where it belongs. Tahoe is crazy right now. It’s halfway through the season there and over 10 meters of snow has fallen so far. Floods in Southern California have been hitting the news lately. The upside is the resort of Mammoth has received a whopping 4.3 meters of snow over 4 days. They are literally skiing onto the 3rd floor of the base building. Needless to say I had to slip in another awesome powder day (marred only slightly with a minor collision with a Porsche Cayenne Turbo, luckily I wasn’t driving).

The business end of the season starts now. We are in Austria and have some training on icy slopes with the Swiss Team tomorrow. Our race schedule steps up now with European Cups and 2 World Cups during January, plus World Champs in early Feb.