Good evening, and thank you for joining me. Many of you reading this are my friends. Many of you reading this know me. Now every one of you has good reason to be critical of me. I want to say to each of you, simply and directly, I am deeply sorry for my irresponsible and selfish behavior I engaged in. I know people want to find out how I could be so foolish.

I have made you question who I am and how I could have done the things I did. I am embarrassed that I have put you in this position. For all that I have done, I am so sorry. I cheated yesterday and rode a chairlift. What I did is not acceptable, and I am the only person to blame. I stopped living by the core values that I believe in. I knew my actions were wrong, but I convinced myself that normal rules didn’t apply. I never thought about who I was hurting. Instead, I thought only about myself.

I brought this shame on myself. I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I’ve done. My failures have made me look at myself in a way I never wanted to before. It’s now up to me to make amends and that starts by never repeating the mistakes I’ve made. It’s up to me to start living a life of integrity.

It’s hard to admit that I need help, but I do. Starting today, I returned to the skin track and banged out four laps and 7,010 feet of blower powder. I have a long way to go. But I’ve taken my first steps in the right direction.

Today, I want to ask for your help. I ask you to find room in your heart to one day believe in me again. Thank you.

So Treepilot Jr.'s snowboard lessons ended a little while ago and Mrs. Treepilot lacks the required skills to pick up where the lessons ended. After 50 backcountry days this winter, I skipped a powder day at my park and headed to the local ski hill, where I bought lift tickets. Ugh. Thankfully they were the "bunny hill" versions for $12 each. We made a few laps on the bunny hill to assess skills and then were forced to head for bigger terrain. We snuck onto the intermediate chair where we made three laps before Junior's legs gave out. The lift operator didn't bother to check the validity of our tickets and that's a good thing because there was no way I paying $50 for a half day full mountain pass. Junior is progressing quite nicely, but I fear I will need to ride chairs again for some period of time before he is able to come into the backcountry.

I got a late start this morning due to staying up late watching some Olympic hockey action on TV. As it turned out, the breakfast girl for the hotel slept in too - so even if I'd been motivated, I wouldn't have had a continental breakfast to enjoy. She was still setting things up when I strolled in at 8:45. It was almost 10:15 when I left the vehicle on the cross country snowboard.

I figured I'd grab the low hanging fruit and put some laps into Lemming Lane. I was solo and assumed someone would have put in the up. Nope - I guess everyone else was riding chairlifts yesterday too. I saw the skidoo that the avalanche forecasters use to cheat on the cross country ski and then found out that they'd used the conventional up via the ridge. I skinned past that one and continued the cross country snowboard along the shore of the lake to the base of Lemming Lane, where I put in the up as steep as I could manage. The storm snow was quite low density, but thanks to close to 30cms up high, it was plenty to cover any crusts that formed in the previous drought. I heard the forecasters heading down as I neared the top of the climb and was a bit bummed that I'd broken the up for them. As it turned out they left though after just the single lap - I guess they needed to get back to the office and write the forecast. Sucks to be them! It would have been nice if they'd stayed off my up though!

I made a total of four laps and each one had a negative split time. Woot! The last up finally had a nicely packed track took me only 45 minutes. There's nothing like blower powder to put a bounce in your step. Total up today was 7,010 feet, which is my biggest solo day ever and the 6th biggest ever. Pretty good considering the late start, two hours of cross country snowboarding and being back to the vehicle for 6PM. With daylight lasting until 6:30ish now I still had ~1.5 hours of light left if I would have exited via headlamp.