While most college students head to warmer parts of the country for spring break, I, along with about 25 others, made the journey from Oregon over to Montana for a week of snow fun. Together we had a caravan of 5 cars for the epic road trip of 14 hours where we stopped along the way a few times for gas and food. The car trip actually went really quickly and we drove through some pretty cool scenery while passing through Oregon, Washington, Idaho and then finally Montana. Montana (from the Spanish word 'montaña' which means mountain) borders Canada and is the 4th biggest state in the USA. Everyone was super excited when we arrived at our accommodation because it was a castle. Yes, a castle. The owner walked us through the castle, explaining how he had built it over 12 years. It had every type of luxury you could imagine BUT strangely enough, it only had one shower. This made for some interesting times. The property is set in a lovely forest about 20 mins out of Whitefish. From the castle, there are views to the Whitefish Mountain Resort and Glacier National Park. Although we just had a huge road trip, everyone was pretty pumped and we kicked things off with some drinks and hot tubbing.

Sunday was the first day at the mountain and wow, was it impressive. Mt Bachelor back in Oregon is huge to me but Whitefish is bigger again. The scenery was spectacular and it seemed like everywhere you looked was a picture straight out of a storybook. The snow conditions were completely perfect, the skies were blue, it was reasonably warm and this continued the whole week, except for a couple of short periods of fog. I found a run that I loved that I kept repeating each day. It starts off being reasonably steep and not too bumpy, then ends with a narrow passage (almost like a natural half pipe) with lots of trees, dips and other obstacles which were really fun to manoeuvre around. It was good for me to practice control because generally I just like to smash it fast down the mountain and hope to the high heavens I can stop before I hit someone or something. So the week continued with days at the mountain and nights of partying, beer pong, drinking games, dancing and general good/fun/crazy times. We had one day off boarding/skiing which is when we went into Whitefish town for lunch and shopping. I went ice skating in the morning with Mikyla and all of us headed to Glacier National Park in the afternoon. Because it was winter, a lot of the park was actually closed off so we didn't really get to do much hiking but it was really nice just driving through and checking out another beautiful part of this country.

At the end of the week I was extremely exhausted and my body was hating me like crazy. Absolutely worth it though as it was a wicked trip. I got to know a whole lot of people in the snow club who I hadn't met before, each of them awesome in their own way and definitely a great group to spend spring break with.

The drive back to Oregon felt like it took half of my life when in fact, it took 14 hours, just like the way there. I slept most of the way and when I got back home, slept for about 12 hours straight and did the same the following two days.

Overall, an incredible trip with awesome people in beautiful location and definitely one I can't remember much of but won't ever forget.