Lost

During January, my mother and I decided to go skiing in Homewood, Lake Tahoe. I was excited, and I thought that it would be a normal trip. When we arrived at the place where we were staying, we thought that nothing bad was going to happen. We were wrong.

Everything was going well, until the 3rd day we were there. At first, everything was normal. When my instructor, my friend and I went up the mountain, everything was going smoothly. At that time, I didn’t know

When we got onto the chairlift, it started to rain a bit, but we were wearing ski gear, so we didn’t get that wet. But because it had rained, some of the snow had frozen up, so there were some icy spots on the mountain. Of course, we didn’t know about that, so our teacher, Valeria, decided to take us on a steeper ski trail called “Bonanza”.

Bonanza had lots of snow clumps on it, so we were prone to get stuck in the snow. Since it had rained before, some of the snow had turned into ice. My friend, Leland, was really excited to go to Bonanza.

“I’m gonna go ahead!” Leland announced.

“Shouldn’t we wait for the teacher?” I asked cautiously, looking around.

“Nah, it’ll be fine. We’ll meet each other at the bottom anyway.”

Just like that, she sped right down the steep slope. I peered over the hill and watched her ski down. Suddenly, she hit a slippery patch and went skidding down the hill, right into the forest at the bottom.

I panicked, and tried to look for a teacher. I realized that Valeria wasn’t here yet, and I was the only person on the hill. I skied down after Leland. I saw her tumble down near the bottom, so I quickly reached her. That was when I realized that we were lost, because I had followed her deeper in. We looked around, but our teacher was nowhere to be seen.

Leland started panicking and crying, and I was really scared.

“What are we gonna do?” Leland wailed.

Leland took off her skis and walked to the edge of the forest, but we could only see the black diamond ski trail, Dutch Treat, and we were only blue, so we couldn’t ski down there. Leland had her phone, but we didn’t have a connection on the mountain.

We decided to ski around for a bit, to see if there were any adult instructors around, and thankfully, we found a snowboarding teacher (I forgot her name). She said that she could take us back down, but she needed to call our instructor first.

After she had told Valeria that we were going back down the mountain, we took off. The teacher asked us what had happened, and Leland said that she had slid down the mountain, because of the ice. The instructor led us back down and told us never to go on a trail without the instructor going first. When we got back down, Valeria was waiting for us at the bottom, looking very worried.

“Where were you?” Valeria asked

“Sorry, I slipped down Bonanza and got lost!” Leland confessed.

“That trail is very steep, don't go down it by yourself.”

“I’m sorry. I won’t do that again. I was just too excited to go down.”

Valeria scolded us both and called our parents. We got picked up and stopped skiing for the day. When I got back home, I was really excited to tell my mom what had happened.

After that day, I took a small break from skiing. I can still very clearly remember what had happened, and I hope that never happens again. It was one of the scariest days of my life.