another 9 runs down

the nutty irishman
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Well who knew i had it in me, we started off the day a little later and did not make it out to the zone until just before 11am.  We were not sure how the day was going to pan out as we are expecting some weather.  Right now both me and my body are praying for weather.  I don't think it is going to come until Thursday though, i am just planning on taking it one day and one turn at a time.

So we started off again at Danoz for 3 runs, these were pretty ordinary for me as my body creaked and groaned - and i just did not have it together.  Well that was until we stepped up the pace and technical capacity.  My god if you believed the heli landing zone up on top of the Nutty Irishman, if i had a heart monitor on it would be off the scale!  The heli was about a metre away from a rock wall with its arse haning off the edge of a cornice and that is even before we step out onto it.

am i on a holiday right now?

trish doing a snowangel
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So out of the heli and now we have to hike up a cornice and our guide steps into a huge hole - i am not in a particularly relaxed state of mind especially when i see we have to get off a lip to stick into the run.  Hmmmmm, am i on holiday right now????  So we set off a cornice and drop into a super nice powdery 40 degree slope that goes on for what seems like forever, it opens right up at the end and enables me to take some wide sweeping turns.  It is actually a run with snow that can't help but make you look like the best boarder in the world - a true glory run.

the relaxing part of the nutty irishman
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In between these type of runs we take a mellow long sunny run, where we can all go at the same time and spread right out across the glacier, i am back to a relaxed state.  I have had the funniest day where i have not laughed so hard in quite some time, we had 3 real comedians in our group that just kept the jokes rolling between heli pick ups.

One of the truly great days that Alaska has to offer.  So tomorrow looks 50/50 as to what the weather is doing, it may be a down day (god i hope so) but it could be a blue bird too.  I was speaking to one of the long termers up here and he is on his 6th day in a row, asking him what it was like he said "Day 4 is the hump day, this afternoon on our last run (number 10 by the way) he caught himself saying "oh that's it?", so tomorrow is my hump day and fingers crossed all smooth sailing from there.  If nothing else i will have butt cheeks of steel cracking walnuts!