Mountain to the Ocean – Snowboarding and Surfing in the same day

Snowboarding and surfing on the same day…as a kid when I was growing up in SoCal it used to be a pretty easy thing to pull off. A lot of the 909 (and 951) hadn’t been built out yet, most of it was either open space, orange groves, or ranches and the 91 freeway hadn’t completely turned into a parking lot. I remember going to the mountains on those good santa ana days and then being able to make it home in the afternoon in time to get a few waves off a building swell in Newport.

So on Friday (Dec 21) the combination of work schedule, recent snowfall, and weather conditions appeared to line up, I called a couple of friends and we decided to give the Snow/Surf thing a shot.

It was a blast to try and we managed to pull it off…snowboarding at Snow Summit and then surfing 52nd street in Newport in the afternoon. The winds didn’t really cooperate as well as I wanted… so the surf was a bit side-shore and chunky when we actually got in the water…but there were a couple of decent sized sets lurking around.

In the process I did learn a couple of things

1. I don’t bounce back from physical punishment as fast as I did when I was 18. (this I actually knew before I went…but for some reason I always managed to lie to myself)

2. Boarding in the local mountains is really hard on your body…unless they just had a ton of snow expect to be hurting at the end of the day. You may even want to invest in a good helmet.

3. When you are really sore getting into a cold, damp wetsuit is just stupid.

Anyway here are a few pictures of the Snow/Ski trip…