Well today brought us confirmation of big news.  The 20 week ultrasound gave Beth and the Baby a clean bill of health and confirmed the earlier guess that we are going to be having a baby boy.  On a side note the tech independently confirmed that the little man was already excelling at his ski form and was seen during the ultrasound with his skis nicely crossed up.  See excellent foot positioning below. 

Believe it or not I am not talking about a long flat  run at SnowBowl, this is the real thing.  Having joined prior to becoming pregnant Beth returned from Christmas determined to get her required ski patrolling days in before she was too far along.  She has now made it and in the process we have found a fun little hill does in fact exist just south of Bismarck.  Huff Hills boasts a whopping 450ft of vertical and belive it or not was the site of a real avalanche this year.  See the crown in the center of the left most picture.  It was of coarse caused by the failure of a wind loaded cornice, lots of wind you know. 

On the plus side of all the driveway shoveling was the great snow conditions.  We are told that normal at Huff Hills is boiler-plate, but so far the conditions have been pretty good.  You do have to keep in mind where the wind does and doesn't deposit snow before you blindly hit jumps.  I rotated around on a couple blind 360's to find myself landing in lightly dusted grass.  Luckily rock is not plentiful here.  All in all much better than sitting on the couch, and some nice variety for our normal XC skiing.  Beth continues to make telemarking look easy.  

Here are a couple pictures of funny things we have notices in our brief ND ski careers.
- You bump your own chairs, the lifty stays warm inside the shack.
- Ski lessons are free and provided at the rope tow by the ski patrollers when available.
- In place of wimpy colored rope boundary fences are standard barbwire.  See the pictures of the fence and the tractor driving on the other side.
- I have been using my ticket bails upside down all these years?  Or have I?  See Picture.
- The last picture is of the patrol hut.  It is a retired FEMA trailer from the Grand Forks flood that is now located directly under the green lift.  Presumably so that patients can more easily drop in.   

Our return trip brought winter quickly back into perspective, all told at least 80% of our drive home was on some combination of slush, ice, and packed snow.  Luckily this year the wind didn't pick up until we were about an hour from home.  So we could at least see most of the time.  Just like last year we left the house with just a couple of inches of snow in the yard and returned to banks 6 feet high.  See picture one.  On the plus side the skiing around town is much improved although Roo is asking for stilts for her birthday.  So she can maneuver in the drifts like a deer instead of being continually high centered.

Back in Grafton the story wasn't much different with a dozen line workers shoveling 18 hours a day to bring some relief to the office roof trusses.  Every year we wait until they bend enough that ceiling tiles start falling down and get the shovels out.  Here are some pictures of the front of the building.  We had to employ a front loader to find the plant entrance doors that were completely buried.  Of coarse accross the street the snowmobile trail was almost bare.

Again this year I managed to worm out of two weeks of work so that we could take full advantage of Beth's only real vacation for the year and head back to the promised land.  We began our trip with a trek West to Helena where we spent most of a week enjoying some time with Beth's family.  We blew in with a small rain storm but the snow cover held and we still managed to get some XC skiing in and spend lots of time socializing and dog herding.  

Next we continued West to Cd'A where we spent most of another week with my family.  The weather was much less white than the year before but the company was just as good.  We did one day of downhill skiing on slightly crusty and sketchy snow.  Beth being pregnant was not a very big fan of the hard conditions so we curbed our desires for speed and got several more very nice days of XC skiing in.  Like always the house was a zoo, with five (5) full sized furry four leggers wrestling around the house.

Here are a couple of the XC skiing pictures, the snow was great for the most part but ask nick how it was at the bottom of the hill he was approaching in the first picture.  Even Beth and my dad trying their hardest to be on vacation ended up taking care of an older lady that crashed and hurt her hip while I skied up to higher ground to call 911.  Again none of us wanted to leave, especially Max who kept trying to get left behind every time we visited someone.

Finally we began our trip back East with a stop in Kalispel and a great day of fresh cream skiing at Whitefish resort with Craig and Amy.  Then on to Cut Bank to see Beth's grandparents Ed and Beverly.  We are truly lucky to have such great families and friends to visit each year.  Hopefully we can continue the tradition and even move a little closer.  Couldn't let the little one grow up in the flat-lands after all.