This weekend was the epitome of a ‘turn and burn’ trip.

As you know, I headed up to Salt Lake this past weekend for a little skiing action with Maadjurger and J-money. Our initial reason was to head up for The Big Lepowski, which is a benefit event put on by Black Diamond. It was basically a day of ski clinics with a bunch of the BD athletes and drinking beer at Brighton.

In the morning we got to do a steeps clinic with Andrew McLean and a couple other folks. There were about 25 people in the group, and a couple other instructors besides Andrew, so we got split up into smaller groups. The group we got in wasn’t the best instructor, but he was a damn amazing skiier and did have some good tips for spotting lines through rough terrain.

In the afternoon we got to ski with Jamey Parks in a ‘freeride’ clinic. He readily admitted that “freeride” is kind of a made up terms, and basically just asked what we wanted to work on. He took us to some nice steep lines, gave us some really good tips and then started everyone on proper ways to huck small cliffs and rock drops. It was a ton of fun, and I feel like I got a lot more confidence out of that one.

As a side note, if you haven’t clicked through to Jamey’s site yet, you might want to, that guy is pretty ridiculous.

That evening was the party and although I didn’t win anything in the raffle, we did get good and sloshed, found some religious advice, and then found some Denny’s.

The next morning we awoke to find a flat tire on James’ car, so we put a little air in it, and began the search for an open tire place. Not an easy proposition on a sunday in Salt Lake City. Eventually we did, and they informed us that it was a sidewall puncture, so no patchy-patchy……

Then they told us they couldn’t sell us just 1 tire because it was an all-wheel-drive car and they won’t just put one tire on a an AWD car because it can ruin the differential. But, they were happy to sell us four tires….

We argued for a while and eventually found a place that would do it for us down the street and hit a half day at snowbird.

The snow was a little hard and the visibility was low, but it was a good time skiing some interesting lines and watching James try not to throw up on the lift from vertigo and a severe hangover.

We completely shattered our legs, and then headed back to the car…… only to find another flat tire.

So, yet again, we pulled out the donut, and went down into SLC to see what we could do at 5pm on a sunday. As expected, none of the tire places were even remotely open, so we bought a couple cans of fix-a-flat, aired the tire back up and set out down the road to check it every 30-60 minutes. By the time we had driven to Provo (about an hour) it had lost a couple pounds, but seemed OK, so we ate some dinner, threw some more air in it, and headed home.

In the end we made it back with about 4 air refill stops on the way, and about 9 hours of travel time.

Yeah, I was a little tired at work monday.

I highly recommend hitting up The Big Lepowski if you’re in SLC next year around this time……. just make sure your spare tire has some air in it.