Snowboarding on Crystal Mountain

Crystal Mountain is soooooo much better than The Summit at Snoqualmie! I went yesterday with Dem and Ryan and we took a 4 hour lesson (2 hours in the morning, 2 hours in the afternoon) and it was SO much fun!! Our instructor was a really cool gal named Vida, who's been boarding for (I think she said) 10 years; she was soooooooo (I sound like a Valley Girl...but I did grow up in California!) much better than the instructor we had at Snoqualmie! Vida even took us up on the slope for the last part of the first lesson! The guy at The Summit didn't. He taught us (with one boot out of the board) to drag our heel or our toe to stop; he never taught us how to stop with both boots strapped in. He didn't even get to us putting both boots in! And he didn't teach us how to get up with both boots strapped in! What with dragging one leg just trying to get down the damn slope, no wonder my groin muscle ached like hell for a week! (For a whole week, I was only able to walk properly with my right leg; my left leg had to be swung around everytime I took a step.) Damn and blast it. I wished I'd have gone to Crystal Mountain the first time. Not only were Vida's lessons much better (her way of explaining and demonstrating how to turn was SOOOO much easier to understand and imitate), she even showed me and Dem how to do the manuevers the goofy way! (The goofy way means that our lead foot is our right foot; normal is the left foot as the lead foot.) She was so great. The best part was that she took us up on the slope and gave us the last part of our first lesson on the slope! The second part of our lesson was done entirely on the slope. The snow there was much fluffier - yay for fresh powder! - and so it was much softer when I fell, though, this time, I didn't fall half as much - go me! It actually snowed on our way up the mountain, too, and all these damn SUVs (there was even a couple of sports cars!) kept riding my ass cuz I wasn't going fast enough; I was already going 10 over the damn speed limit! It was snowing for Pete's sakes! GAH! But, in the end, it was a great day!