Hi, Jesse.

Katie, I barely made it here today.

What happened?

I was skiing with a friend.

I have a friend who lives year-round in Lake Tahoe, which is amazing.

And we were at a place called Palisades Tahoe, Great Mountain.

This was just the other day. We go up a lift called Granite Chief. Probably my favorite lift

anywhere. It's just amazing, you know, miles of meadows, trees, rocks that I avoid that he jumps off of.

We get separated. I've done this lift a lot of times. I go to the left. You stay to the left.

You get these amazing sweeping views of valleys. Three feet of powder underfoot. I've never skied

in powder like that, because I'm from the East Coast. It's all ice. I keep going. Katie, imagine

just untracked wilderness. You're a skier, right? Cross country? I ski on occasion, yeah. So you know, you know that feeling, right?

Right. So I keep going and there's no, no one's been there, totally on track. But then I hit a point where, like, I can't go any further down. And I'm in three feet of snow. No one's around. I don't know how to get up the next ridge to keep going down. So imagine this beautiful scene of untouched wilderness and then a extremely sweaty, 250-pound man climbing up a hill on his hands and knees

because that's the only way to keep his weight distributed. You with me so far?

Not hard to imagine. So I'm getting really sweaty, but I'm starting to think like this is a good learning

experience. Like I'm getting better as a skier. I'm getting better as a person. I go down further.

I realize I don't know exactly where I am. I don't seem to be getting back to the chairlift I thought

I was at. I do come to another chairlift. Unfortunately, it's closed. I don't know what to do. I keep skiing

down into the woods, assuming it'll feed back to where I am. Then I reach a creek that is totally

blocking off any further progress. There's nowhere else for me to go. I realize something is wrong

when I call out, hey, like pretty loudly in a crowded resort president's day weekend,

nobody calls back.

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