With the superlative and singular terrain of Nepal it seems that casually trekking amid the jagged mountains is pretty pedestrian. There are certainly enough thrill seekers fueled on high horsepower trucks and death-defying adrenaline rushes that can make good use of Nepal’s extreme geography. Apart from the degree of personal risk involved in an expedition to the summit of Mt. Everest, there are countless combinations of normal recreational activities mutated into something insanely suicidal, but a good laugh if you survive. You could say that mountaineering to the top of Mt. Everest is the most extreme activity on the planet, but then consider that it takes months to get up there, and most of the action moves extremely slowly and you undergo prolonged trauma from the cold and shortage of oxygen. Let’s classify this less of an extreme sport and more like being a subject in a torturous medical experiment.

Isn’t it about time to start up hiking again? Well, we all have taken an atrophy break for a few months, but with the warmer weather (above freezing, woohoo) I’m getting the earliest signs of spring fever. When I wake up in the morning I don’t have to break through the ice on my blankets, and my shampoo isn’t frozen any more. I feel a light buzz of adrenaline now that the sun sets later and my legs are anxious to go run around the block. I’m in a wide valley surrounded by mountains, and I always look up and imagine hiking to each of the many peaks. However, the snow is still pretty thick and the temperatures still must be as cold as my apartment, so I don’t plan on any hikes up there just yet.

If you noticed the photo from my last blog post it looks an unbelievably steep trail from the summit down to a bottomless chasm miles below. I was writing about snowboarding down Mt. Everest and this photo came up in an internet image search with not much of a description, so I thought it might be the route Marco Siffredi took. Thinking more about it I can’t imagine anyone making any form of a controlled descent since it is practically 90 degrees vertical, not to mention the major outcroppings of rock. This is more like urban legend than anything and I must be way off. But then looking at that photo there don’t seem to be any other reasonable choices for where to tip your nose down and fly. I mean really, what can you do besides loosely controlling free fall to the bottom? You couldn’t even get traction on your board to slow down. The only thing keeping your speed in check would be when you reach terminal velocity, where the force of the rushing wind holds you back from accelerating any faster than a few hundred miles an hour.

Although I’ve spent a number of years of my life in Utah I’ve never actually gone to any of the fine ski resorts to go skiing. That is until this past weekend, when our chief web designer invited me to go snowboarding at Snowbird. I remember in high school noticing that a lot of the other kids disappeared several days out of the week each winter to go skiing, and then some of them would turn up hobbling back to school in a cast. Not only was it an expensive sport to get into, it seemed to me like you’d probably break something along the way. I got enough encouragement to try it out this time, and I’m glad I did. The equipment rental turned out to be a lot more expensive than if I had just gone to a movie for the afternoon, or about five all day actually. I had a great time showing off my crashing skills, but after the first couple of runs I got the hang of it. I probably won’t get out of the Chikadee run for a while, but then I’m not in a hurry to leap off of any black diamond trails.