Stowe Week 3

Friday, Sam and I were with ski patrol. We were in the new summit building for most of the day because it was raining. All of the employees live off coffee. Every break room around the mountain has a coffee machine. All of the ski patrolers would sit on the comfy couches, nap, read, or just chit chat until a guest gets hurt or if a lift is having mechanic issues, then they would have to respond. Guest safety is their number one job...and pretty much only job. In the early morning patrolers will sweep the trails checking the conditions, markers, fences, closing unsafe trails, and fixing any other common sense obstacle that could increase the risk of a guest getting injured. When we did a run down with 2 of the patrolers they showed us what a normal morning sweep was like. All of the patrolers would go down different trails and then meet up again where they intersect, that way if one patrolers doesn't make it to the next check point, it won't be hard to hike back up that little part of the trail and see what happened. In the patrol building I asked some of the patrolers general questions like how long have you worked here, whats the most common incident, whats the worst you've seen, etc. Some of the older guys that are patroling there been patroling there since they were 16 years old! Thats commitment. One guy said that skiers usually break their femers and snowboarders usually hurt their wrists, do a face plant from catching the toe edge, or nailing the back of their head from catching their heel edge. Those are the most common injuries I see.
Saturday I could not make due to personal reasons, buuuuut I did go to Stowe on Wednesday and sat  in with the ski & ride school. I picked a perfect day to go because there were 5 other riders and 4 of them are going for their level 3 in a couple weeks. One of them happened to be in my level 2 exam. Our trainer was Bonnie who was going for the National AASI Division team out in Copper mountain, CO in April. We all did a small task of showing what fun is on a snowboard, talked about different ways to show and explain things to guests taking a lesson and making sure that each sensory cue is touched because every guest learns differently and if a guest can come out a little better each lesson, most likely they are going to stick with the sport and spend more money at the resort. We also did some personal riding improvements. Bonnie brought us over to some nice soft bumps that went down forever. We worked on switch traverses and did heel to heel noserolls which was kinda sketchy because you're spinning blindside. It was a really awesome afternoon. It was a good hint of what a level 3 exam would be like which I would not go for next year, but maybe senior year. It would be pretty sweet to have some gold bling on my graduation gown.