January 08, 2007
Timber Birthday Weekend
Timber's birthday was this weekend, and this has been the first day since I have known her that she hasn't had to work on her birthday. And I've known her when her birthday was on a weekend before. :-( At any rate she wanted to do some snowboarding this weekend. So we left on Saturday morning, but after having to pick her car up from the tow yard and having to drop Wookie off at Spots our prospects for snowboarding on Saturday shrunk to a half day. But as we got closer to Truckee we decided to skip snowboarding on Saturday and head straight to Reno. We stayed at the Silver Legacy in downtown Reno. After we got checked in and situated we went for an early dinner at Brew Brothers. The beer was good for the most part, and so was the food. Timber got a New York Steak sandwich and I got a buffalo burger. After dinner she wanted to do some shopping, so we went over to the Summit Sierra Mall, which in my opinion is one of the worst mall concepts I've ever seen. The really bad thing about it is that it is an outdoor mall. This means that you either have to go to a few stores and then drive to the other end of the mall or take a shuttle (at least they have one). But the problem is that it was 30 degrees. Who want to go to an outdoor mall when it is freezing outside? I certainly don't. After trying to find another mall we decided to escape back to the Silver Legacy where we spent the rest of our evening checking out different things. On Sunday we went to NorthStar and found that many things had changed. For one they have much more parking than they used to, and for another the village is almost complete now. They also have a new 6 seat chair lift called the Tahoe Zephyr Express. We spent some time on the front side and the backside and also tried out the new chair. It was very crowded in the morning but as the day went on and we got away from the beginner areas the crowds started to dwindle. Overall the conditions were not that great and I would wait for one or two more storms before going snowboarding again. It also looks like NorthStar is going to add even more parking and expand their terrain significantly. I'm excited by the prospect of new terrain, but not at the prospect of more lines and crowds. This is definitely moving me toward more backcountry snowboarding.