First off, this is just a giant book thing of stories that could maybe keep you amused for more than two seconds. Just stories of any and all that is funny…that us weird band people can relate to anyway…

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Band Trips: Crested Butte Colorado

Well, here’s the first stop on this rollercoaster of hell, the band trips. Now, if you’re in band, you know that you have a band trip to somewhere in the world every year. It’s what most band geeks look forward to. It doesn’t even have to be far away and we still get excited. It’s just the way that we are. It’s going to happen, so just get over it, okay?

The first one I’d like to mention is the Colorado trip that I was on my freshmen year. It was a nice trip to go on. There’s not a better feeling than to wake up at four in the morning to come to school. Yep, there is defiantly nothing like it at all.

We got our stuff loaded onto the charter busses, then got into our seats. The total riding time to get to this Crested Butte Colorado was about seventeen hours. That’s not extremely bad.

We arrived at this mountain at about eleven o’ clock and checked into our condos. Yes, I said condos, not those gay hotel rooms that come with their own window stalkers and non-working lights that shock you when you touch them.

After that night, my roommates and I decided to go up to this mountain thing and attempt to ride down it. I agreed not knowing what I had just gotten myself into. So, we traveled up onto this, this…thing, and prepared ourselves to go down the slopes and get to the bottom. We didn’t really do as we planned…

We evidentially took a wrong turn somewhere and we ended up completely on the other side of the mountain and then we had to take a ski-lift up to the double and triple black diamond areas…for those of you playing the home game, that means that we found the expert area of the mountain…and with us not being experts…you know how well that goes.

We asked the guy running the ski-lift if we could ride the lift back down. That went real well. He basically laughed at us and then said that the only way down was to ride the slopes. Well, with us barely understanding what the hell a ski-lift was, we didn’t really feel like we should ride the slopes down. And to make things worse, at that time we had about two hours to find our way down and get back to the lodge or we wouldn’t get to eat the dinner that the band boosters were hosting for us.

We skied on what we could and walked the rest. We found this one part that was, and I kid you not, a slope with an angle of like…I don’t know…eighty or something. It was very, very, very steep. And we decided to walk down it.

About halfway down, I get this idea to use our skies like a sled and to just ride down this steep hill and then continue our little journey. Well…that didn’t go as planned either. Even though we were by the tree line, what was left of the tree line anyway, there were still people on skies and snowboards trying to run in to us on purpose and stuff.

I guess the ski patrol decided that this was a bad idea. So one of them came down and talked to us. Not only could we not “sled” down this mountain, we were evidently walking on the wrong side too.

“ You’ll have to got over there to the other side if you guys are gonna walk.”

So, we listened to her. We started across the snow and had skiers trying to run into us. We about killed four or five people before we got to this other side. By then, we were already down the freaking slope and didn’t have to really walk anymore.

And the skies came back on and we prepared to ride again. There was this little curved part that took us to the other side to the mountain that we were ridding on. We were both trying to go as slow as we could so that we didn’t fall off of the thing. And what do you know; a few more snowboarders came from behind us.

On of them rode over my skies and tripped me. I fell down and started to slide. Not only did I fall down and slide, I even fell off of this curved pathway and off of a twenty foot drop. Seriously, it was not fun.

Caleb Lines was with me when I fell, so he came up to the edge of the “cliff”, as we’ll call it, to see if I was okay.

“ Are you okay?” He asked.

I was in a little mangled ball and was buried in the snow. I sat up and spit the snow out of my mouth.

“ Does it look like I’m okay?”

“ Well, you’re still breathing right?”

“ Yeah, so.”

“ So, you’re okay.” Then he started to laugh.

Now, by that time we were to the little bunny hill. Easy stuff, I thought. Caleb went right ahead and rode to the end of the hill. There was one thing that I had on Caleb…I knew how to stop.

His way of stopping was to find the biggest mud puddle that he could find and just fall into it and slide until he came to a complete stop. I watched as he did all of this in a matter of seconds.

I popped my skies back on and started down the hill…I got maybe five feet the I did a face plant. I got up and just said screw it. It wasn’t worth it. I was already sore from the other stuff.

But in the end, everything worked out like it should have. We got back in time to eat, and I got back in time to get a massive headache. But, it was a fun experience. The only thing that really sucked was that it took four and a half hours to get off of this mountain…