Spring Surprise

Friday, March 30, 2012

Dylan went up on Tuesday—it was the best weather of the week…or at least as sunny as spring break was going to get this week. I had to work.

The wet weather pattern continued through the week. I got up this morning and looked at the Pass Cam and saw it was raining. That didn’t get me too stoked. By the time Dylan got up at 9 the snow was sticking. He gave me the “there’s not to many days left” story and convinced me to go up. It turned out to be an eventful day.

We arrived around 11:30. While there was snow on the ground, I had a healthy level of skepticism going in which continued on the first lift ride. My comments went something along the lines of “there’s a 50-50 chance of this being horrible.”

We got to the top and headed for the standard first run on a powder day: High Lead. We dropped into about 18” of something that was close to the consistency of slush. I told Dylan that I had wakes coming off my skis every time I turned. He said that was the biggest line of B.S. he’d heard since Kayla’s studded tire story.

To digress a moment, when we were in Colorado over the holidays, we went up to Fort Collins to have dinner with the family. Kayla dognapped Casey dog and wanted to go home. The only thing was she didn’t want to drive. Neither did I. So she started cooking up excuses. The best one was that “studs are like ice skates.” She claimed her car would slide right off the road if she was driving. Yea, right, just like ice skates. She ended up driving.

The conditions were actually pretty fun with fat skis. I got just enough float out of the Rossi’s to make it acceptable. Dylan thought it was the bomb.

Dylan stopped long enough to get a few shots of me.

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On the second run we heard sirens from the lift. Multiple sirens at The Pass is never a good thing—it means someone did something horrible either at the ski area or on the road. We didn’t think too much of it at that point.

Dylan tests out the wide surface area of his snowboard.

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By run eight, I was completely soaked, kind of beat up and ready to throw in the towel. That was in part because we had a show tonight. When we stopped, Dylan went to get a soda in the lodge and I walked to the car. I noticed that vehicles were parked on the road so I went into guest services to see what the deal was. It wasn’t good news—there was a fatal head on collision two miles down from the ski area and the road was closed for at least two hours. They said the coroner wouldn’t get there until 7 to do the tough work.

It was about 2:30 and I needed to be back in town by 6:30 to load up. My intent was much earlier so I could get in a hour or two of practice before the show. After checking with guest services, we walked out to the road where the DOT truck was blocking traffic. The DOT guy said it would be 90 minutes or more—they didn’t know. The investigators were doing the forensic reconstruction of the accident to determine what happened.

So…it was decision time. We could take our chances waiting or we could drive back through Bend—a four hour detour, but one that wasn’t blocked. We chose Bend. It was a long haul. Dylan took over in LaPine and drove the last three hours. We got into town around 6:15. As it turned out, we probably would have only had to wait an hour or so for the DOT to open up one lane and let traffic start passing. Oh well.

The show at Cornucopia Maize Lounge was fun, but poorly attended like our previous show at the Axe and Fiddle. The cover charge was $3; we ended up with $21 so I made $5.25 on the night. My dinner was $11 with tip… There were probably 20 or so people there on and off. We were well received and did a pretty kickin’ second set.

I’m a little baffled about how to build an audience at this stage. When we were younger, you just invited your crowd and you could guarantee 30-100 people would show. Nobody I know (including myself) goes on to clubs on weekends. My conclusion is that we should focus on billing with better established bands as well as playing festivals. In the meantime, I’ll keep practicing and writing. Even if nobody comes to our shows, we should have a cd worth of original material ready later this year.