5000 Miles of Freedom: Skiing Big Mountain

January 20, 2009 - So I blogged a few nights ago about the Montana microbrew beers and how they are so much better than any other state's microbrews. Well here is a picture and the correct name of my new favorite beer. Salmon Fly Honey Rye by Madison River Brewing Company. The other beer in the picture is an award winning beer I have had the past two years at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, probably one of the better events Denver hosts. If you are a beer lover (Semel) I HIGHLY recommend you go out and find either one of these beers.

So now on to the days activities. As the subject line of the post suggests Sarah and I skied today. We are staying about 15 mins drive from Big Mountain base. Lucky for us the inversion stuck around for another day and now I have some pictures to show you all what the hell I am talking about. As I said, and this is from my understanding of what an inversion actually is, high pressure systems force colder air down into valleys and create cloud cover at low altitudes. The clouds sit so low in the valleys that the surround mountains poke up through the clouds and allow people to literally go above the clouds. I have only ever before experienced the inversion in Jackson Hole but Montana suffers from them too. So without further ado here are some pictures.

Now you all know what the inversion looks like. Here are a few other pictures I took today that I like a lot. I call the first one "Soldiers in the Sun". The second picture is of a bank of snow flakes that we skied by today. We were totally blown away by how big each of the flakes were (2 -3 inches) and how intact there were. I thought the picture might be worth sharing.