This weekend our friends over at the UCSD Ski and Snowboard Team got to make their way up north to the wonderful lake Tahoe for the regional races. The regional race is a competition between UCSD’s Southwestern conference and the Northwestern Conference of Northern California. The race alternates between Mammoth and a mountain in the Tahoe region. This year the race was held at Sierra-at-Tahoe, a small mountain located on the southern region of the lake. The weekend started off awesome with a day of skiing Mammoth on Friday before the journey further north was made. With the event on Saturday and forecasts of snow for both Tahoe and Mammoth, our skiers were uncertain at how feasible the races would be when the courses would be buried in sweet, sweet powder. Nonetheless the team adventured into the unknown territory of Tahoe to ride for the South and conquer the north. The regional competition consisted of slalom events for both snowboarding and skiing as well as a slopestyle for each discipline as well. For our skiers we had Remi Barthe, Jack Beaver, Kathy Qi and Tobin Groth competing, and on our snowboarding side we had Jeff Lampert, Lisa Shpitalnik and Oliver Hammond.

Unfortunately for the skiers, the Northwestern Conference are very strong racers and none of our guys or gal were able to place especially well. During the skiers slopestyle the snow had seriously begun to fall. The inches of snow accumulating each hour, the jumps and features became more and more difficult to boost making the already difficult competition even gnarlier. On the other side, the snowboarding slopestyle proved to be quite difficult for all riders as the team was used to the fantastic Unbound terrain park of Mammoth which is nationally recognized and the jumps at Sierra proved to be quite lacking comparatively. Sadly the snowboard slalom event was cancelled due to the heavy snowfall. While competitions were not looking solid, both skiers and snowboarders got to enjoy a number of powder tree runs as the inhabitants of Sierra appeared to have an aversion for knee deep sick tree runs. With rough weather in the forecast, the team decided to journey back to the lovely Southern California Sunday, but were significantly delayed by closed roads. All in all the journey back was a grueling 12 hours that consisted of packed cars and dealing with incapable drivers along the snow filled grapevine. While the drive back may have been brutal, two solid days of skiing and boarding were had. That’s all for this week, see you all in Jackson’s Hole for nationals, Yea Haw.