Our first endeavor of the year was a hybrid of two different activities.
While reading through our travel guide, I turned to Sara and said, “Our travel guide is full of recommendations for activities involving the greatest snow on Earth.” Many of you may be thinking well of course it is! Utah is full of skiers and snowboarders. It is a state of people that love the snow, but it is also full of people that come from a little further south.
Luckily, we have the guidance of a great coworker and his great wife. They are avid cross-country skiers and offered to take us cross-country skiing. Scott (the coworker) and his wife, Mikjan, are really interesting people. Their hobbies include a weekend window washing business, flying model airplanes, and raising betta fish.
Our first part of the adventure was going to Outdoors Unlimited (Outdoors Unlimited is a business on BYU campus that rents equipment for active activities) on Friday night. Neither of us had ever been in this store before so we spent a little time looking around before we were approached by an employee asking us if we needed some help. We were rushed to the “we will not sue you when we break our legs” agreements, filled out our information, and were soon ushered into the back room. The guy helping us there asked us our shoe size, and we were soon trying on these massive boots.
At this point, I was a little confused. When I had talked to Scott about cross-country skiing he told me that it was like hiking. Nothing too intense, just a little exercise. But the boots that we had on were up to our knee.
“Are you sure these are the right boots?”
“Yeah they are…”
“I haven’t done this before, but it is just that our friends that are taking us said that cross-country skiing is not a very intensive activity.”
“Whoa wait, you are going cross-country skiing? I just assumed that you were going downhill skiing because no one comes in here to rent cross-country skis.”
Little did he know that cross-country skiing would be the best first step for us. Why would we want to go tumbling down a mountain at high speeds for $62, when we could be falling over on a trail for free.
*This is a message from Sara. I just want to mention how many times we fell. For the uncoordinated, like me, it was more than it should have been! Haha. I fell a total 7 times. JT fell 4 times…3 of those were real falls, but one of them was staged. I had fallen on the flat part of the trail and it was super hard to get up. I was trying to get up with two giant bananas on my feet--long, awkward, and slippery. I was embarrassed that everyone was waiting for me and for the life of me, I could not get up! Jokingly, I told JT to fall down with me so I wouldn’t be the lone person flapping like a fish out of water. And guess what?! He fell for me! He rocks.
Well, anyways, we had a lot of fun and would be up to doing it again anytime!
We included a video for your viewing pleasure. It doesn't look very steep, but the video can be deceiving (and there was like 4 feet of snow).
