By Jason Adair

The Donner party had it easy... Being trapped in the snow and having to fight for dear life is a completely rational struggle. Willingly driving up to a ski resort to try and balance on a slippery board sliding down an even slipperier surface is pure crazy. At the same time, people who live hours from the slopes have accused me of being crazy for not taking advantage of the natural wonderland that is the snow-capped Sierras. In an effort to figure out just who needs to be institutionalized, I enlisted my 16-year-old daughter, Cheyenne, to accompany me for a day of snowboarding.

I hadn’t been snowboarding in fifteen years, that’s how badly my first and only brief attempt at the sport had gone. My daughter had never really had an interest in going. Yet there we were, at Boreal Ridge on a crisp Sunday morning in December, stepping out of our toasty car and getting slapped in the face by that high sierra wind that is so cold it makes your fillings ache. My daughter shot me one of her patented, “Have you lost your mind?” looks, a question to which I had no answer.

As we waited for our snowboard lesson to begin, we struggled to make sense of the disjointed elements before us: The whole mountain was still wearing its summer clothes, except for the two stripes of snow that ran from the bottom to the top of the mountain. Even though it was a practically cloudless day, the snow machines and the wind were conspiring to create a magical yet miserable snowstorm. Yet every single person who worked at the resort was genuinely helpful and friendly. Twilight Zone, anyone?

After a half-hour of snowboarding theory and a little hands-on training, it was time to head up the mountain and see just how much punishment a person can willfully inflict on himself before crawling back to the car in tears. The first run down the bunny slope took the twelve of us almost half an hour. At this point it was difficult to tell what was taking a worse beating, people’s egos or their behinds. Slowly but surely everyone began to have small successes, and by the end of the lesson, not only were most of us able to make it down the slope in under five minutes, but no one had quit or been injured.

In the lunch room I asked my daughter what she though of snowboarding. She told me it was not all that great, and that she really wasn’t interested in trying anymore. I talked her into taking at least one more run, seeing as I only snowboard once every fifteen years.

One run turned into two, which turned into five, and so on. An hour later we were riding the lift up for another “last time” when we both had to admit that we were really enjoying this whole snowboarding thing. Not only that, we were getting pretty good at it too.

Finally Cheyenne was too tired to continue so I told her I was going to take a couple more runs and meet her back at the rental counter. Half-way down the slope, I caught an edge and fell so hard that I was convinced I had broken my tailbone. As I rolled around in pain, I thought about a friend of mine who had fractured his tailbone snowboarding and had to sit on an inflatable donut for six months. I cursed myself for being so careless. “You’re thirty-six year old! Snowboarding is a young man’s game! What were you thinking!?!”

After lying on the snow for a minute, the pain started to go away and I realized that maybe I was a little hard on myself. I took it real easy down the last part of the hill, and as I was unbuckling my bindings to walk over and meet my daughter, I was overcome by the pull of the mountain. Crazy as it seemed, I had to take one more ride. I took one last run and finished my first real day of snowboarding on a high note. Then Cheyenne and I packed up our gear and headed down the mountain.

As we pulled away, I mistakenly thought the best part of the day was behind us. But that post-snowboarding ride home—comparing aches and pains, successes and failures, and sharing giggles and bone-tired sighs—was a chance for the two of us to spend time not just as father and daughter, but as friends.