He fell from the sky

Since the beginning of the semester, Kyle Poll and Russ Tanner and I have made of point of heading up to Sundance each Tuesday morning for a few hours of skiing before getting down to the school work. We all have college student el cheapo season passes, so it's no big deal to use this as my way to get exercise regularly. Plus, Sundance is only 18 minutes from my front door, so I'm sure I'll never live closer than I do now.
Today was no exception to the Tuesday morning rule, except 11" of new powder fell up there yesterday afternoon. New powder combined with blue sky and lots of sun constituted perfect conditions for dropping the one and only cliff at Sundance. We took a preliminary run at "the cliff" and were pleased to find the landing suffocating; literally--we were inhaling the powder. Here are pictures of Russ and Kyle on round 1. I'm not sure what Russ is doing in this one, but I can think of worse places to pass gas.

After the preliminary run, we were prepared for round 2. We headed back to the cliff and had Kyle check out the takeoff and landing zones before skiing down to prepare for filming. Russ hit it first, and got MAJOR air. From my vantage point, he hit the jump, flew quite a ways up in the air, and then disappeared behind the cliff. He crashed on impact, got cleared away, and I was given the green light. I took it with just a bit less speed, but still got a lot of air. I'm estimating we dropped around 20' vertically. Russ maybe was hitting 25'. Russ is the one headed for outer space; I'm the one doing the sweet 80's spread eagle. So, the bummer of this all was the Russ lost his ski when he hit the ground. We didn't think it was going to be a big deal but 1.5 hours later we were still searching for it to no avail. We called the ski patrol to see if they had anything to help us find it, but the best they could offer was to send a patrolman down to help. We were hoping for a metal detector. Actually, after we badmouthed the patrolman for not showing up, he finally made it about 45 minutes after we placed the call and we'd given up and were heading out. Good of them to come at all, I suppose. So, the ski is peacefully sleeping under the powder below the cliff, waiting for some unsuspecting victim to launch himself onto it. We thought about sending a snowboarder down the run -- we knew that they could probably find and run over the back or tips of the ski in a mere matter of moments since they seem to be so capable of doing that under normal conditions. :-)
Despite the lost ski, it was a great ski adventure. One not to be soon forgotten. Now if I could only find a job...