Underhill Update Blog

With Christmas less than a week away Andrea and I are thankful to have all of our shopping done.  We are now 5 days into our Christmas Break and enjoying the time we have been able to spend with family.  We had my Zach and Nathan stay with us for two days last week on their way home from Prairie Bible College.  We headed over to Spokane with them on Saturday to spend the day with family and visit Seth who flew in from Wisconsin. 

On Sunday Andrea and I headed from Spokane North to Banff where we stayed with Andrea’s cousin Ally and her husband Jon.  We had a great visit with them and got in a day of Tele at Sunshine on Monday where Ally works as a patroller.  The last few days we have been staying with Andrea’s Grandmother (Betty) seeing the sights in and around Edmonton.  We have thoroughly enjoyed our stay with her.  Tomorrow we head to up to Andrea’s parents home for Christmas, where it looks like we are in store for a white Christmas this year.

Last week at camp, we headed up the hill to Siegel pass to clear the area of snow for our tent structure for winter skills.  We placed all the poles and it is now ready to be wrapped after the New Year.  It was a gorgeous winter day that was highlighted by seeing two bull moose who were very content to just stand and watch us watch them. 

We also had the Bighorn Christmas party last week which as always was a good time.  The kids filled the lodge with laughter and we enjoyed great food and a Texas Hold ‘em game that lasted until the early morning hours.  The following day we headed up to Lookout Pass for some great early season skiing together!   We wish all of you a Merry Christmas and wonderful time with family and friends as we together remember our savior’s birth!

Well, here we are in December already only 3 weeks away from Christmas.  We went into Missoula on Saturday to drop of the McPhee’s who had bought a new car and it was crazy how busy things were.  I am very glad that we have all our Christmas shopping done.  We went out on Saturday afternoon and cut down a Christmas tree.  We are going to be up in Edmonton for Christmas but decided we still would like to decorate our apartment for the time we are here this month.  We have to find a tree that isn’t all that big due to the small nature of our apartment.  We ended up staying up late cleaning and rearranging trying to get everything to fit right.  The only problem is now that our tree is up all the snow is gone as we are in the midst of a pretty strong winter storm that is bringing rain instead of snow.  This is dissappointing, but we are hopeful for more snow soon so we can get out and use our skis.  I worked as an EMT on a fire at the end of the summer and we used the money to buy some new telemark skis from Black Diamond this year.  We got them mounted last week and are excited to try them out here soon!  For those that care (Black Diamond Havoc 175cm, O1 Mid-Stiff Binding for me and Black Diamond Velvet 165cm, 01 Mid-Stiff Binding for Andrea).  Should be a good setup.