Snowboarding, Fishing, and miles in a Dodge Minivan

February has almost hit its end, which is both a blessing and a curse, a blessing because its almost spring, and a curse because, well, it’s almost spring. February is also the time of year that Montana is blessed with an influx of visitors. This year it was a good turn out, although we missed two regular contributors from the West Coast. Mariah And Damien, I hope you enjoy the new digs! We had the Dans from Duluth, high school friends, and John, Josh and Charlie who are all college friends.
The timing could have been better as there was only a day overlap with all of us together at once, and it would have been cool to go riding with everyone, but people get older and turn into wuss’s and some would rather snowmobile than ski/snowboard and blame this on the fact that they have injuries that are long since healed… Yea, I’m looking at you DAN!
We got some quality riding in with the college buds, enjoying both Moonlight and Bridger. Both were good days, but Moonlight was a bit better as the weather was colder and that kept the snow in some good condition. Josh and I both got treed, at different times, but the result was the same; tired, sweaty and cursing the tight trees and waist deep powder. We both thought about giving up and waiting for ski patrol to come find us and haul us out, but figured better to tough it out so that, that story would not be told for years to come over breakfast at the Cats Paw.

After everyone left, I went back to work for five days. Matt sent me some photos of an epic day he had on the (west) Gallatin river, so needless to say I needed to fish after the work week. I called Matt and wanted to know if he wanted to fish, he said that he needed to spend all day studying for a test, I told him that what he needed to do was to go fishing and stop complaining. It took a minute or two but I ended up convincing him that this was a much better plan than 12 hours in the library. We headed out to the Gallatin, after about three hours we gave up and admitted defeat without a fish to hand.

Now I am sitting in the coffee shop, waiting for a reply on a question I posted to my GIS forum before I finish my homework. So I figured what better time to invest in a quick little update.