Lutsen Trip

Ok, now that I finally got the video problems worked out I'll post a recap of our trip. We were in Lutsen from January 6th-January 9th to go snowboarding at the Lutsen mountains. All in all there were 7 of us that went up for the 3 day, 4 night trip. 4 of them went up during the day on Tuesday, a friend and I had to work till 10:00 Tuesday night. We got on I35 a little after 11:00 pm for the 4 hour drive. We made good time till we got on Highway 61 on the other side of Duluth. Just after getting on 61 we saw deer hanging around on the side of the road so we decided to play it safe and drive well under the 55 mph speed limit and we never went over 45 mph the rest of the way. We got to the Solbakken resort where we were staying. We didnt get up there till 4:00 am, and didnt get to bed till 5:00 am. Woke up at about 9:00 am Wednesday morning. I headed in to town with a friend to pick up the lift tickets and get some breakfast while the other guys got ready. We got back to the cabin at about 9:45 to pick up the other guys. We left to head back to Lutsen to snowboard. So, the way this resort has their roads back to the highway setup is there is one road that goes pretty much straight to the highway but is a bit steep in the snow. The other path goes around the rest of the cabins but is not nearly as steep. So, we decide to take the shorter way since we were in an SUV. We make it up the incline just fine but once we were are about to get to the highway there is a propane truck filling a truck that is right in our way and there is no way to get around him. We think, son of a b!tch, but whatever, we'll just put it in reverse and take the other way around. Well, for those of you who have never been to Solbakken the roads are EXTREMELY narrow. We almost get back to the other road when all of a sudden we start sliding down the little embankment on the side of the road. Not that the embankment was steep, but when its covered in snow it is very slick. We try putting it in drive to try to get out, but we only slide further in the embankment. So, we get out, we try pushing it out, we try digging it out. Finally our buddy goes to get his SUV to try to pull the other car out. Well, the SUV that orginally got stuck is still far enough in the narrow road that there is hardly any room for the other SUV to get by. Of course, our buddy who was trying to pull the first SUV out also got stuck. Luckily it didnt take long to get him out. But first car took forever. To make a long and frustrating story short, we broke our only shovel digging out the undercarrage of the car. In the end, we dug out enough of a hole and filled it with some pieces of wood from the wood pile from our cabin while 2 people pushed the car sideways and 2 people pushed from the front. All this took about an hour and I honestly thought we were never going to get it out. But after this we get to Lutsen. The good thing about the day is that we got to enjoy lake effect snow the entire day and we had some nice fresh powder. We boarded until about 3:30 then headed back to the cabin. Went to bed around midnight and woke up around 9:00 Thursday morning. We left for the mountains around 9:45 and thankfully this time we didnt get stuck. I did bring my video camera to do some filming of my friends doin some jumps and I will post atleast one of the videos. Thursday was nice and sunny so we got both types of great weather for skiing/snowboarding, nice fresh snow and nice warm sun. We went back to the cabin around 3:30 again and went out to eat at the Cascade restaurant just to our north on 61. I didnt get to bed until about 4:00 and had to wake up at 8:00 am Friday to get ready to head back home since I had to work at 3:00. Luckily, the winter storm that was supposed hit central Minnesota went south, otherwise I wouldn't have gotten back until well after 3:00, since we didnt get back til 2:30 even in the good weather. So that's a brief recap, I'll post one of the videos and a couple pics:


Pics from a chalet and from out cabin. God I want to be back there