My first double diamond experience

A couple of weeks ago I took a day trip to Kirkwood and it was great... big open spaces, lots of trials for me to get lost on.
I went on my first double black diamond: The Wall...


The view from the top of the wall.


What was I thinking??? Well, I guess there's only one way down...


My friend Karena stuck on the side/slope of the mountain. Gives you an idea of how steep this thing was.

Crazzyyyy.. good times though. I'm gonna get one more snowboarding trip in next week before spring settles in.

1 year anniversary

Today marks the one year anniversary of my first day at Apple iPod Engineering. Indeed, its been a crazy year starting over again and getting used to my new environment.
Praise God, its been such an interesting year where there were tons of changes, yet through it all, He's been totally faithful.
Its hard to imagine time passing by so fast, but I look forward to whatever God has in store for me :)

Tahoe w/ ALCF and being stuck for 14 hours

Given the fact that I've never seen falling snow before last year, I think I've caught up from the years I've been missing out this past weekend.
Here's what I woke up to...


We rented out 5 cabins in Tahoe and had a good time just hanging out with some of the most fun people around. The ride there was fine, typical 4 hour drive from the South Bay to Tahoe. We even drove through this cute lil' town call Sunol, I'll definitely have to revisit someday. Saturday a bunch of us went skiing and snowboarding at Alpine Meadows. I don't know if I like the resort very much. I went on the blue trails but they were definitely borderline black diamonds. The thing that was soo annoying was that every hill had moguls! Sucked for my knees. There was TONS of powder though. The week leading up to this weekend had snow dumps of around 4 ft. Even on the groomed slopes there was a ton of fresh powder. However, by the afternoon it had started snowing again and visibility was down to about 5ft. at the summit. It was horrible, you couldn't tell whether you about to go down a trail or a cliff death drop.

Horrible visibility at the top of the summit. Yeah, that lil' orange sign is a cliff warning.

By Sunday morning it had snowed another foot and it looked like traveling home was gonna be a long trek. We started off from the cabin at 10 am. It was 13 miles to the 80 Freeway from Tahoe City, that leg took us 6 hours to get through. SIX HOURS! We got onto the 80 Freeway around 4 pm and we didn't get towards the bottom of the mountain for food until 8:45pm. After that we didn't get home until 1am. All totaled, it took us 14 hours to get home on a trip that typically takes 4 hours. I learned many valuable skills that day, putting on and taking off chains, finding a bathroom in a campground, scraping ice off of windshield wipers, and how fast it takes for icicles to travel down a windshield.

The completely stopped traffic on the 80 Freeway.