The last trip broke my arse, so what might the next bring? Anything short of befriending a Truckee-based bail bondsman is likely acceptable.

The boys are back in town. Well, not exactly back in town yet. Eight more earthly rotations with respect to the sun. Then the boys are back in town.

And that’s a good thing.

It’s an annual tradition, more or less. Winnowed down from big, multi-family trips 15 or so years ago. Now distilled down to a thinly-attended cage match, for the most part. Three of my closest college friends and I come together for a long weekend throwdown in Tahoe.

Originally, as I say, the tradition also involved our wives, and shortly thereafter, our own toddlers. Those early years contributed to the Ski Trip Lore, for sure. Ever come nose to cabbie ID card with a taxi driver who legally changed his name to “Succesful Excellent”? Been there, done that. Ever been vocally accused of smashing a sliding deck door’s glass to smithereens and turning a bedroom into a snowdrift in order to get a laugh? Falsely accused, in this case. For once. Not that guilt or innocence mattered. The fact that I seemed the most logical explanation for this particular incident meant that our family-friendly trip days were likely numbered.

Sans wives and children, these Tahoe pilgrimages brought our baser instincts to the surface. Well, at least my baser instincts. Exhibit A: A giggling, real-time video interview of a winded buddy scrambling to pull himself out of deep snow using only whisper-thin sapling tree branches. Some of my finest journalistic work. You really want to watch the video in the last link, by the way. Particularly since my Edward R. Murrow impression therein was likely the proximate, karmic cause of the aforementioned broken arse 6 years later, with which I opened this post. And which inspired me to contemplate a coccygectomy.

Moral of the story? Turn the video camera off. Help your buddy up. Or get pushed down the stairs with a well-deserved foot in your chest some 6 or 7 years down the line. Talk about a dish best served cold. The foot-in-chest constitutes Exhibit B, for those counting.

But I’m older, wiser and more mature now. So if I could do it over again? Well, the stuck in a tree well video is awfully good. So I probably would do it again and just live with my eventual comeuppance. Maybe insist on rental cabins with carpeted stairs, or better yet, no stairs at all. I have 8 days to ensure our hotel room at Squaw is karma-proof. That should be more than sufficient, right?

Thanks for reading.