(This post was originally an e-mail sent to my friends and family.)
I woke up this morning with a pretty bad cough. I hadn’t been feeling sick, but a weekend of some of the most brutal physical activity of my life definitely weakened my immune system. Having been through three airports in the past 24 hours, I’m not surprised I picked up a little something. While I don’t relish falling a little behind on my work on the week before a milestone, it HAS given me ample opportunity to scribble down all of my ruminations about this past weekend’s trip.
I was invited to go along on this bachelor party sometime in mid-January. Ed, one of my best friends from work, is the best man for our friend Scott’s wedding in early April, and was organizing a skiing / snowboarding trip to North Carolina for the bachelor party.
The attendees were:
- Me. Brendan! You know!
- Scott Visavachaipan. Go ahead and try and pronounce it. You can’t do it. No one can. Scott lives in Orlando and works as an cinematographer and video editor. He and his girlfriend Kristine have been living together for many years and are simply making their marriage official this coming April.
- Ed Tchen, Scott’s best friend from high school days and best man for his wedding. Ed and I were leads together on Star Wars Battlefront, the first game that I was a lead designer on. Ed is a worldbuilder – 3D modeler and artist who specializes in environments and playable levels. We’ve worked together on my current game for a while, although he was recently changed to a new start-up project.
- Jerome Terrell. A friend of Ed and Scott’s since college, Jerome went to FIEA in the class after me, Cohort 3, as an artist, and got a job at n-Space shortly after as a worldbuilder. He worked with me on Star Wars Battlefront and James Bond Bloodstone. He currently works at a simulation company across town.
- Jordan Johnson. Another high-school era friend, Jordan worked at a bakery with Ed and Scott soon after emigrating from Great Britain as a teenager. He currently lives in Miami and works as an architect. I’ve met Jordan a few times at Ed’s house at parties before.
- Dennis Heeke, Scott’s half brother who didn’t fit in well with the group at all and took a lot of smoke breaks.
Most of us met up at Orlando International Airport at about 8 in the morning. Jordan had to work on Thursday, and so did not meet up with us until at about midnight that same day. Orlando Int’l Terminal A, incidentally, has a Nathan’s hot dog stand that begins cooking hot dogs at an early hour, and the temptation to get a hot dog as a breakfast item is a difficult urge to suppress.
Our flight took us to Atlanta, where we raced to a different terminal just in time to board our 25 minute flight to Asheville, North Carolina. Asheville is in the far west of NC, a short distance away from the Tennessee border. We touched down in Carolina around 12 or 12:30.
It was freezing, and by “freezing,” I mean it was about 50 degrees. It was pretty brisk the entire time we were in North Carolina. The mornings, before it started to get window, were absolutely perfect – unless you’re hoping for snow. I was pretty worried about the lack of snow-creating weather until I discovered that someone had thought of this problem way ahead of me and invented a pretty elaborate artificial-snow generation device, which of course meant that we would be able to go snowboarding no matter what.
None of us had eaten, so once we got our minivan, we descended into Asheville in order to find food. Between my inability to successfully spot the differences between my iPhone’s minimaps and Asheville’s clumsily thrown-together roads, we got pretty lost, eventually going in a gigantic loop until Scott took over the job of navigation and directed us properly. This began a weekend-long spree of seemingly accidental one-up-manship on Scott’s part, where I would do something and then Scott would immediately do it again, way better. Buying steaks, charming clerks with interesting-sounding last names, getting on ski-lifts – you name it!
Our lunch destination was 12 Bones Smokehouse, which had a line of customers reaching out the front door when we pulled up. A small, Asheville-only franchise, it boasted an incredible selection of rib styles and sauces, including the peculiar but delicious Blueberry Chipotle. I opted to get the Hogzilla sandwich – bacon, pulled pork, and bratwurst on a hoagie – instead of ribs in order to break away from the crowd. 12 Bones serves all of their meals on big metal tins, with your sides well-scooped around your entree. I enjoyed some corn pudding and incredible sweat potato mash – but all of this, including my excellent sandwich, was topped by a surprisingly authentic slice of Key Lime pie. I also fell in love with one of the waitresses, but we left before I could buy a house and set up an appropriate stalking routine.
After lunch, we conducted a massive shopping excursion at the Walmart Super-Center. North Carolina has no Publixes, which bewilders me and my narrow view of how the world works. Regardless, we loaded a pair of carts with equal parts alcohol and mealtime components. We expected to cook a great deal, and we bought a huge smattering of items in preparation of such a task.
Once our minivan was loaded with groceries, we headed west. Our cabin was at Boyd Mountain Log Cabins in Maggie Valley, just outside a town called Waynesville. A lot of us on the trip drive small, sporty cars, and the low horsepower of the minivan was wildly frustrating – particularly given the ramps and slopes of Appalachian-area highways. Seriously, people, elevation terrifies me. You’re driving, and then all of a sudden there’s a drop – a drop sharp enough that if you were walking, and you tripped, you might could die. But you’re supposed to drive down it. And there’s houses along that drop. Madness.
We didn’t really believe our cabin when we drove up to it. We thought it had to be a mistake of some kind. It was too nice. The outside was gorgeous. It was huge – four bed and three bath, almost the perfect amount of room for six guys to stay in over the weekend. Full kitchen and incredibly plush living room. Indoor fireplace and outdoor firepit. Huge deck, with rocking chairs and a patio table. High definition TVs, central air and heat. Tons of bath towels. Washer and dryer! It was better than nearly every hotel room I’ve ever stayed in.
Here is the website specifically about the cabin that I stayed in, with excellent pictures: http://boydmountain.com/clinch-valley-cabin.html
As if the surrounding area couldn’t get more picturesque, the cabin was on a mountain which doubled as a Christmas Tree farm. I was so enamored of the surrounding terrain that I resolved to immediately sprint up the closest mountain, which I’m amazed to say that I did just that – although it mutilated my energy levels for the rest of the day.
Once we unloaded our bags and put away all the food, it was getting later in the day – close to 5 or 6. We decided we would head to the ski mountain to try and catch one of the free instructional classes around 7:15. We bundled up in waterproof garb and piled back into the minivan – only to yet again be confounded by tough-to-follow directions and terrifying elevation.
We rolled up to Cataloochee Ski Area (http://www.cataloochee.com/) sometime in the 7:30 area. The mountain was, thankfully, open until 10 – but we were too late for the lesson, which turned out to be irrelevant because all of us wanted to snowboard and the lesson was for skiing anyway. After renting boots and snowboards, we signed up for a private lesson on the bunny slope with one of the instructors – a lesson that wound up being extremely worthwhile, because there’s no way any of us would’ve figured out what we were doing without it.
Catalooche looked a lot more like what I had expected to see up in the mountains – lots of grit and ice with some well-used log building at the bottom of the mountain. The ski mountain itself had an interconnected series of slopes, such that regardless of which difficulty or height you opted to try, everyone always ended at the same place when they got to the bottom of the mountain. The bunny slope / training area that were started off on was pretty gentle as slopes go – steeper than the slant of a parking garage ramp, but not by much and not consistently so. A people-mover ramp on the side of the slope ferried us all to the top.
Nick, our assigned ski instructor, looked and sounded exactly like what you’d expect a North Carolina skater boy to be like. He was a lot of help and went carefully and deliberately through all of the steps with occasional bursts of high-level snowboarding mindset philosophy thrown in.
We began simply by determining our stance – Dennis, awkwardly, though that he was goofy foot when in fact he definitely was not. I rode regular, and so strapped in with my left foot and started getting used to the feeling of this huge slab affixed to my leg. Before we even went down the slope, we practiced shifting our weight from our heels and to our toes in order to curve the board’s path to come to a stop. With just one foot strapped in, I tried some small runs down the slope – and caught myself by my free foot as I came to a stop each time.
Great work! said Nick in italics, Now try for real – with both feet strapped in.
I can do this, I thought. I will shred.
I eagerly tossed my other boot into the strap and inched down the side of the slope – and very quickly lost balance. The entire concept of balance disappeared from my frame of reference. It was like a laser shot my brain and deleted “balance” and any associated concepts. I tumbled and fell – hard.
Ideal snow for skiing and snowboarding is referred to by enthusiasts as “powder.” This was not powder. This was several-day-old slush and ice that had been compacted and compressed by skiers and snowboarders going over it again and again and again before we showed up at 7:30 at night. It had enough give to it to make it inconvenient to stand up in. Oh god, standing up. I got to the point where I dreaded the wipe outs far less than I dreaded having to push myself back up, and in fact I busted my wrist pretty painfully that first Thursday night until I hashed out a better solution the next day (standing up facing up the mountain and then leaping 90 degrees into place once erect.)
That Thursday night was full of trial and error and a lot of bruises and bumps. We came back to the cabin past quitting time full of energy, eager to head back the next day and try it again. Charcoal grilled bratwurst, steak fries, and fair amount of beer helped us round out the end of the day. As we waited for Jordan to show up (he was flying in late, remember), the guys treated me to my first-ever viewing of one of the most confusing action movies I’ve ever seen: Arnold Schwarznegger’s Commando. The trials of boarding and airporting took their toll, though, and I was fighting back sleep by the end of it. In my sleep-walk to bed, I left a completely full beer open and waiting on the table in front of me, which I was forced to finish the next day to support the fanciful creed of No Beer Left Behind.
I rose Friday morning to the sound of breakfast being prepared. A feast of Eggo waffles, coffee, and bacon was made available thanks to Jerome and Ed’s efforts. We each compared where we hurt the most – my arms, oddly enough, had taken the greatest toll. We wrapped up breakfast and hurried to get re-equipped to see what snowboarding during the day would be like.
The most noticeable difference, first of all, was the sheer number of people. A scant following had been in attendance on Thursday night past 7. Now were at the mountain at 1 o’clock on a Friday 40 minutes away from a town with a major university in it. The joint was bumpin’. There were all kinds of people there, too – tons and tons of small children, all of whom seemed to have little fear of careening down a mountainside on a pair of skis. Families, other vacationers, and coy locals were everywhere.
Once we were re-equipped, we took a couple of practice rounds on the bunny slope before deciding we were ready for the real deal.
Cataloochee has, aside from the training slopes, three grades of difficulty to their slopes. These grades are simply relative to one another and don’t conform to any universal ski slope grading scale:
- Green Circle – An easier trail, suitable for beginners and novices.
- Blue Square – For those looking for a more exciting challenge.
- Black Diamond – Holy shit!
The grades in difficulty are based primarily on steepness of slope, and build atop one another. You can take a trail that’s primarily green or blue, or weave in a section graded at green or blue or black difficulty before you get to the last stretch, which is also the first green tier slope.
The website has a good map of the trails that shows what I mean: http://www.cataloochee.com/cataloochee_info/trail_map.php
Our attempts on Friday – and for most of the rest of the trip, took us down the two green paths on the right side of the map, “Over Easy” and “Rabbit Hill.” Before I tell you about the trails, though, I have to tell you about the ski lift operators.
The ski instructors – like Nick, from Thursday night – seemed to be informed, friendly locals. In fact a lot of the people that we ran into during our time in North Carolina were friendly and eager to help us out. The ski lift operators were different. They were more like the Gringotts goblins. They were like carnival ride operators. They were silent, soulless automatons who existed for a simple, mundane task – hitting the button over and over – and they hated that this was their lot in life. They did not speak, or smile, or assist you in any way when you fell off of the lift because you got on wrong, or fell off when dismounting every time. If you asked them a question about the destination of the lift, or some other mundane feature of the course, you got an answer back that sounded half Portuguese and half cockney. It was in these mens’ hands that we placed our lives each and every time we got on board the ski lift.
Between the two green courses, “Over Easy” was supposed to be the simpler of the two, but it was clearly not the case for several reasons, all of which we discovered through lessons of pain:
- You actually have to take a sharp ramp down from Rabbit Hill to Over Easy in order to even begin that part of the course, which is a fantastic place to crash if you’ve only been snowboarding for about two hours in your entire life.
- It’s narrow and bounded on one side by the pillars of the ski ramp, which means there’s very little room for turning or dodging. This is especially a pain when, like me and Ed, you’re using big slalom turns to try and get the handle of the terrain down.
- It’s bounded on the other side by the goddamn woods, where I’m sure there are wolves.
- It’s also used as the stunt course for particularly sick ‘boarders. As in, grind rails and ramps. Which were being constructed right in the middle of the path as we tried to head down – constructed by men that looked like they were close kin of the inhuman lift operators.
This last point was particularly obnoxious because they would leave their instruments in places where they were obvious hazards. On one particularly epic spill, I tumbled head-over-heels before skidding to a halt with my face literally an inch away from a planted shovel. It was not to be my last close call with terror.
I spent much more of my time on the “Rabbit Hill” side afterwards, which has steeper drops but it longer and much, much wider. One of the biggest problems that I ran into was that I couldn’t keep my balance even after pulling to a full stop, and many times, the board would attempt to slide in some new direction because I’d frozen in one position for too long. The solution presented itself to me when, completely on accident, I came to a stop – and then switched positions and began flying down the mountain in a goofy foot stance. I pulled to a stop in that stance, and then switched back to regular – intentionally, this time. It didn’t stop me from wiping out, but it definitely reduced the number of times that it happened.
We took a couple of breaks at their well-equipped lodge and traded stories about our various misadventures on the slope. As evening began to approach, Scott indicated that he’d prefer to get dinner going soon. We’d had a fair bit of fun on the green slope and wanted to take it up a notch before we took off for the night – we were going to go down the full green path, beginning with the “Upper Turkey Trot” path halfway up the mountain. It was foolhardy, but we were here to shred, dammit.
Ed, Jordan and I were the only ones with the energy for the new path. We boarded a different ski lift and were immediately stricken by terror. The other ski lift had travelled maybe 20 to 30 feet off the ground and was well lit. This new ski lift was a carnival ride into a nightmare. No lights, no safety net or anything of any kind, and almost immediately hundreds upon hundreds of feet over the forest floor. It was petrifying how scary the lift ride was. I’d never been so happy to clamber off onto an exit ramp in my life.
The exit ramp, however, presented a confusion scenario. There was a path right in front of us, and lots of criss-crossing areas above us … but no signs to indicate where to go, or helpful “lifeguard” stations of any kind. We strapped in and decided to take a wild guess and pick the first way down.
The first way down was a blue path. It’s marked on the path as “Lower Omigosh.” It was steep. Steep the way stairs on a boat are steep. We were careening.
I did two full 360s using my stance switch approach to slaloming down the mountain before crashing as I rolled to a stop. I flew straight forward and landed chest first, knocking every bit of the wind out of me. For a bleak moment I thought I was pretty much done – that I’d screwed up, I’d sustained some embarrassing, life-cancelling injury, and that I needed to compose myself enough to disappear into the wilderness so that people could at least pretend I’d died in some noble fashion like bear-blasting or something. I started doing the weak, lunatic kind of laugh that you can only do when you think you’re on Death’s doormat.
A few deep breaths later, I slid around and popped myself back up into a stand. The rest of the trip down was less like a snowboarding session and more like a calculated series of prat falls, where even as I stood, I knew that I was going already out of control and headed for the ground, and it was all that I could do to try and travel far enough down the mountain that I would get out of the steep zone in the hopes of one day standing up the way that humans are known to do. After about ten minutes of straight tumbling, I collapsed in a heap at the bottom of the mountain.
We adjourned to the cabin with strong talk, lots of laughs, and a dash of lies. We grilled steaks, made a bonfire, and traded tales and jokes over drinks. Card games and video games helped round out the evening. I think I crashed at about 4:30 AM after an hour and a half straight of Marvel vs Capcom 3.
Saturday was recuperation. I was beat, and even when we went snowboarding at the end of the day, I barely had the energy for a couple of runs. Saturday involved a lot of lounging about our spectacular cabin and admiring the unbelievable scenery.
We drove back into town Sunday morning at breakfast at the Sunny Point Cafe in Asheville before spending some boring hours at the airport. My flight from Atlanta to Orlando took me on a different plane than the rest of the crew, so I bid them a safe journey and headed off on my own. I was moved to four separate seats as I attempted to board the Orlando jet, thanks to a comedy of errors between the flight attendants trying to help non-English-speaking families sit together.
It was a fantastic trip and I’d gladly make a yearly visit out of it. The towns were amazing, the people were great, and the prices were quite reasonable considering how plush the accommodations were and how much fun the journey was.
