Spur of the moment cat skiing

Last week was a very long week. I worked something like eleven days in a row and each day was at least a twelve hour day. And in the middle of it all something outside of work made it even worse. So on Friday at the bar eating dinner barely able to stay awake, when Andre said he was going cat skiing my ears perked up.

Sure, he didn’t have reservations, it cost $400, they were probably full and I was drunk off the one beer I had at the office, but I said yeah, let’s do it.

He called Cascade Powder Cats Saturday and at 2:30 they let us now that they had a spot for us on Sunday.

Sunday at 5:30 a.m. I arrive at Rob’s house to meet up with him and Andre. We then bust it over to Skykomish (okay, ten miles past there) to this little blue cabin. We’re twenty minutes late and are convinced they left without us. As it turns out we were the only people signed up (the day before they had twenty people.) Lucky us! (Note: always go skiing on major football play-off days.)

We loaded up in the cat and slowly made our way up to their Yurt. While the cat was cold it was not nearly as cold as it was outside. Plus they had an iPod hookup and we rocked out to Wolfmother.

We then proceeded to ski in the driest snow I’ve ever felt in the North West. We got in three runs before lunch and probably another five to seven runs after lunch. Unfortunately it hadn’t snowed in five days so occasionally we would cross over some other tracks but for the most part it was freshies all day long. But the best part was that it was a clear sunny day. Those are extremely rare around here!

At $400+tip (how much are we supposed to tip!?) it wasn’t cheap and I probably won’t repeat at that price unless there is a major dump. Primarily because you only get around 10,000 vertical feet in (the gating factor is the slow speed of the cat.) My feeling is that $100-$200 is more around the price point where I wouldn’t think twice about cat skiing. Though they do have a $3000 season’s pass (their season is at least three months long.) Very tempting for next season!

Anyhow, the trip to the mountains was just what the doctor ordered and for the first time in a long time I got more than five hours of sleep.