Colorado, Part 3 -- Or, How I managed to take an intermediate slope on my very first day

It turns out that you can collect some pretty good stories when you go skiing for the first time. To avoid a ridiculously long blog post telling you all of those stories at once, I've gone with installments. Find out why my instructor called me "The Troublemaker" here, and then read here about how I earned that nickname by having a screaming Tourette's tantrum on my first green slope ... in front of children. Not that they heard me. Those a-holes were flying!

Thank goodness my husband is smart enough to know that I wasn't going to make it down the mountain on my own, but nice enough not to make me say that I needed the Ski Patrol to rescue me. And it was even as though God wanted to make the move easier: At the bottom of the steep cliff in front us, there was a break in the trees, an entrance to another slope. But what sat at the corner of that crossroads was one of the most beautiful sights I could have imagined: a Ski Patrol sign. With a phone underneath it.

K, who has been skiing pretty much since he could walk, flew down the hill to the phone. Since (no matter what method you use) it's easier to get down the mountain than to climb back up it -- and since I wasn't sure how long we'd be waiting on Ski Patrol -- I relied on my favorite this-cliff-is-way-too-steep method to narrow the gap between K and me: sliding on my a$$ down the hill. K took my skis and planted the bottoms in the snow so they were standing behind us.

It was only a few minutes before K, who was facing the top of the slope, said, "Here we go." I had hoped for a snow mobile, but I didn't hear anything. Before I could even turn my head, my method of rescue was resting in front of me. I was mortified by what I saw.

So mortified that I immediately started crying.

My "snow mobile" was a man with a long sled behind him that had a pole attached on each side of the front end. So because I was intimidated by the cliffs and grade of the slope, this man standing before me was going to have to ski my wimpy butt down the rest of the mountain.

(My knight on skis with his rescue sled looked something like this. Although this isn't him. This isn't even Keystone. I got this from AmericanIdle.com. Because I'm the one who always takes pictures, and I was a bit busy at this point. Busy crying, remember?)

The man greeted us. Made sure we were the ones who called. He looked at me, still sitting pathetically in the snow. "Do we have any injuries?"

"Just my pride." He laughed and said something about how that made his job easier (the lack of injuries, not the injured pride). He asked where we were headed. When we told him, he said, "Gooood! That means when I'm finished with you guys, I get to go to the lodge and relax and have a beer!"

K was trying to figure out why I was crying. I explained. (In case you forgot, it's in the paragraph above the picture. Also, I really didn't cry long -- only a few seconds. There was just a lot going on in those few seconds.)

My rescuer had heard my explanation. "Well, where are you from?" he asked.

[sniff] "Oklahoma." [sniff]

"Well then this is to be expected!" my rescuer said as though that explained everything. "You guys don't have mountains like this in Oklahoma!"

"I know! I've never even seen skiers until this weekend. And this is the most snow I've ever seen in my life. By the way, this is NOT a green slope!"

K chimed in. "Yeah, this is nothing like the greens in Pennsylvania."

"Imagine that!" my rescuer said. "The mountains aren't as steep in Pennsylvania either." He had a good-natured way of teasing that didn't make you get defensive.

Me rescuer turned to me. "If it makes you feel better, I've already done this 3 times today."

K asked my rescuer how long he'd been ... well, rescuing people. "Seventeen or 18 years," he said. "We've kind of lost count."

My rescuer told me to climb in the sled and to grab the reigns between my legs, as though I were riding a bull. He even told me to resist the temptation to let my right arm fly like I was riding a bull. (Seriously, best-natured rescuer ever!)

When he had me all loaded up, just before he grabbed the poles on the front of the sled, he turned to K. "Are you a good skier?" K nodded. "OK, great!" He turned to me. "Since we don't have any injuries to worry about, I'm going to take it a little faster than I normally would, OK? Just hang on!"

And we were off.

We were flying! I was actually worried we were going to catch some air and I'd fly off the sled. But my rescuer was very capable. He flew down the smooth slopes, and when we hit the cliffs, he turned his body completely sideways, with his skis almost on top of each other. We were still going quickly, but it kept us in control and kept me inside the sled.

Then, my rescuer turned us onto a blue slope -- an intermediate slope. I looked to the side and saw K skiing confidently and quickly just behind us. (My husband is a good skier!)

Where I sat on my rescue sled made me the perfect target for the spray of snow from my rescuer's skis. Slightly because of that, and slightly because of the cliffs ... and slightly because of the speed, I closed my eyes a couple times on our ride down the hill.

Which was over in a matter of a couple minutes.

"Is it pathetic that I was actually scared just riding on a sled down that hill?" I asked. My rescuer laughed. "You really are a superhero. You know that, right?" As far as I was concerned, for his insane skiing skill -- all while carting me down the mountain -- and for getting me to the bottom so unbelievably quickly, he was a superhero.

K and I thanked him and headed on our way. As we walked, K even commented about how fast we'd gone. "I was skiing full speed just to keep up!" I was glad K had gotten at least a little good skiing in for the afternoon.

"Hey," he said, "now you can tell everyone you went down an intermediate slope on your first day!"

We headed back to the condo for dinner. The 8 other people (all guys, by the way) staying in the house are rock stars at either skiing or snowboarding, so they were eager to hear how my lesson and first day went. K had said he wouldn't tell them about the Ski Patrol, but I told him I didn't deserve that treatment for wussing out on the hill (even though I did make it halfway down on my own through various techniques).

When we finished telling them our Schoolmarm-1, me-0 story, one of our friends (the one person there who actually lives in Colorado) brought up the bunny slope: "You didn't take the whole thing?"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

He explained that on one side of it, the slope curved to the left. It went on a good distance longer, and you take a ski lift back to the top.

"Are you kidding me?!" We had seen the curve, but we assumed it went on to some slope I wasn't ready for. How could we have missed that?

I suddenly had a lot more hope for Day 2 of skiing. Little did I know, it would bring me an even crazier story than Day 1.

An even crazier story? What the heck am I talking about? Find out here!