Revised Diagnostic Essay

Clay Warinner
English 111-43B
Revised Diagnostic Essay

Imagine being thousands of feet up on a snowy mountain with snow flurries all around. Now image cruising down the mountain basically "floating" down the hillside weighlessly on a snowboard. Snowboarding is one of my favorite thing to do during the winter. One of the best vacations I have ever taken was a snowboarding trip to Keystone, Colorado with my family and a couple friends. My mom had bought me a plane ticket as a graduation present for me graduating early at the end of January from highschool. I have been snowboarding for over 10 years all over the east coast, but this was my first trip out west and definitely one I will never forget.

The plane landed in Colorado on a cold late night in January. We got a rental car and headed for the cottage on the mountain side where we would be staying for the trip. After driving for what seemed liek forever we finally got to the cottage. Inside the cottage was a full size kitchen, a pool table, a log fireplace and enough rooms for my mom and stepdad, two younger brothers and me to each have our own rooms. The inside of cottage was beautiful. It had just been recently remodeled. It had that classic log cabin look to it. It was by far the nicest place I had ever stayed in on a vaction.

The next morning my family woke up early to meet my friend, Nick, and his family and enjoyed the complimentary breakfast served at the ski lodge. After breakfast we got our lift tickets and hurried to the slopes. The lines for the lifts were a lot longer then what I was used to on the east coast, but the lines moved fairly quick due to the large seating compacity of the inclosed gondola lifts. Most of the lifts I had been on before only seated from two to four people and were not inclosed. These lifts held anywhere from six to ten people. The ride up on the gondola lift took about 15 minutes to reach the top of the mountain, but you got in about 45 minutes of ride time before reaching the bottom of the mountain. That definitely made up for the long lines and the ride time from the bottom of the mountain to the top.

The conditions for snowboarding were amazing. The mountain was covered in fresh powder and it wasn’t that artifficial "man-made" snow I had been used to from snowboarding before, it was real snow straight the clouds and it seemed like it was constently snowing. The mountain had over 120 trails, 3 bowls, 3148 acres of land, night skiing, tree skiing and a huge terrain park. I spent most of my time off the trails riding through the trees making my own trails where noone had been before. That was the best part of snowboarding in Colorado. I had complete freedom to ride where ever I wanted. I didn’t have to stick to the trails everyone road. I could make my own way down the mountain.

If I wasn’t charging off trails into the woods, I could be found at the terrain park. They had 4 sets of huge jumps probably about 25-30 feet high, mainly for the professional boarders, followed by different sets of rails including rainbow rails, c-shaped rails, straight rails, slanted rails and inverted rainbow rails. After the rails the park had other little jumps scattered down the mountain. The terrain park also had a half pipe.

By the end of the first week of being at Keystone, Colorado my friend got injured going of one of the big jumps in the terrain park. He had to take a couple days to recover so from then on the rest of us to took it a little easy cause noone wanted to get hurt at the end and not be able to ride the rest of the trip. You always had to make the last couple days the best.

When we weren’t on the slopes we in the cottage either playing on my friends Xbox 360 he had brought with him or we were in the pool hall playing games of billiards. By the time we left all of us had gotten exceptionally good at pool.

Snowboarding in Colorado was one of the best vacations I ever taken. It was by far the best skiing trip I had ever been on before. After snowboarding on the big mountains out west it made me not want to snowboard on the east coast anymore. Nothing compares to my experience at Keystone. Im looking forward to hopefully getting to go snowboarding again sometime out west this winter season. It was a trip ill never forget.