The End of Utah

Blogging is hard work! I haven't had a chance yet to debrief the rest of my trip to Utah, and I can hardly remember it by now, but I'm going to give it a shot.

Laurenne took me to the Center of Excellence one day, the training facility for the US Ski Team. She said it cost 30 million dollars. She gave me a tour of everything, from the weight room to the basketball court to the skate park to the kitchen to the pool room....I might have gone a little out of order there. In the skate park, they had a basin full of blue foam cubes which you could jump into or crash into when you're doing a gnarly move, which I thought was pretty cool. It was fun to see a lot of people I had met working out in there.

Laurenne had to take a ten-minute ice bath, so I sat with her and got to meet Ted Ligety, an Olympic gold medalist. He owns a company called Shred, which makes helmets and goggles and sunglasses and such. He seemed like a pretty cool guy.

Let's see, I remember doing some rock climbing too. Perilous rock climbing. I led a couple of 5.9s, and the first was kinda pumpy because I got lost off the first arete because I didn't have any beta, but I sent it after all. (Sweet rock climbing talk, huh?) The place we climbed was above a freeway, so the speeding cars added to the danger.

The trip home was pretty fun. We stopped at some salt flats, and saw where Morton salt is made. There were huge cones of salt, probably fifty feet tall, just sitting in the desert outside of the factory. We saw a really strange tree sculpture too, which was guarded with a barbed-wire fence. Very strange.

Laurenne was really annoying on the way home. I had to punch her a few times and tell her to shut up over and over again. No, that's not true. I only had to punch her once, because I punch really hard.