You pray for rain, you gotta deal with the mud too.: Mt Baker Banked Slalom

Ahhh the whirlwind tour that happens in February. Leave SLC and land home in Seattle at Midnight. Up at 5AM for the drive to the legendary Banked Slalom. Never been to it, but finally got in so it's time to do this. Supposedly Thursday you can pre run the course but there is heaps of snow and the course is buried. High avy danger keeps every one in bounds. Run one, going up chair whatever and we look over to see a full blown avy rescue going on. Dude drops an inbounds cliff, breaks loose the entire ridge and supposedly takes out a bunch of people below. People are going nuts. Full probe lineup of people looking for victims. Man it was scary. There must have been 50-75 people searching. Ends up the dude was buried above all the below commotion for 20 minutes and dug himself out. Then went and found his buddy and dug him out. Thank God, no deaths. Run the course a couple times at 3PM.
Friday up and at em and to the mountain by 8:30AM. Do the registration thing and see everyone and everyone in the pro shred status. Go into fan mode. Get over that quick and get ready to do my first snowboard contest ever. Us elder gentleman run second after the older ladies. I'm 25th to go. Course is soft as hell and you got a narrow margin of line to stay on before you go off course and come to a stand still. Have a bet going with Maxx and Byron, ex Option dudes, about which one of us hacks will post the best time. Listened to Maxx's advice about taking first 4 turns easy then letting it run and end up making it down. Not feeling like I killed it or anything, but made it thru some of the shit and stayed up. Byron goes down in his run. See Maxx later in the day and question each other on times. I know I got a 1:45 something; he's got a 1:45.21. Hmmm, this is going to be close. Baker announces that they are shutting down the mountain on Saturday due to too much snow, high avy conditions and the possibility of high pressure coming in. The qualifiers for Saturday are out and the top half from each class transfer to Sundays final. Decide to pull out of Baker and avoid Saturdays drunk fest as there’s nothing to do but drink in that town on a down day. Check the website and see I made the final AND posted a 1:45.08. Just enough to take the $15 bet and be the 8th one in my class. More to come on Sunday’s results.