Saturday, January 27, 2007

Seven Springs, the largest ski area in Pennsylvania were having a "harsh winter". This is not a figurative speaking; in fact, it's the complete opposite. The winter was so mild that they had to truck 6 million pounds of snow to fill up the slops and trails. Thankfully, the weather came back to normal in the beginning of the Spring semester. We have snow regularly falling from the sky in the past two weeks. Civil and Environmental Engineering thus chose a find day today to hold their annual ski trip, and I was luck enough to be one of their guests.

To maximize the time we could spend in the ski resort, the bus was scheduled to leave Porter Hall at 8AM sharp. When I was heading to the rendezvous, it suddenly occurred to me that I had never walked on an early morning street in Pittsburgh. The emptiness of the streets is the complete opposite of the crowdedness of the slops in the ski resort, and I certainly had never snowboarded on those slops before. In fact, this is my first time to try snowboarding. I took an one-and-a-half hour lesson to learn how to control my toeside and heelside, and to make J-turns. Before I called it a day, I finally gathered enough courage to take the high speed six-passenger chairlift (or the Coca-Cola Polar Bear Express Lift) and snowboard down a slop called Philip's Run.

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