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.   

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.

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.

I know most of you do not find yourselves in the Dakotas looking for mountain biking trails very often, but if you do check you my new trail guide site.  I put together a guide of all the trails we have discovered around the area with some very idiot proof web tools I have discovered.  Thanks, Google!  Thanks, Weebly.  Check it out and see what you think.  Not to bad for a non-computer engineer.