snow!
David & I took a 3 hour drive to the Balsalm Meadow Sno (yes, California is retarded and intentionally misspells the word snow) Park. Other than a trip to Tahoe that we took when David was 7 months old, this is the first time that he's gone to play in snow. Overall, we had a great time. The parking lot is ridiculously small (it could comfortably hold about 10 cars), but thankfully we arrived relatively early and got a decent parking space. The park is mostly a wooded area, with one open hillside that makes an excellent sledding area. We started off just hiking into the snow, which was nearly 2ft deep in some places. Much of it near the parking lot was already stomped down from about 2 weeks of dry weather. However, we hiked a decent distant out and the snow was alot fluffier. This was both a blessing & a curse, as David kept sinking in up to his crotch, which he found amusing and frustrating all at once. We tried to do some sledding, but the small hill that I chose was really bumpy, and David ended up getting thrown from the sled. We wandered around some more (finding the dismembered carcass of a snowman), with David picking up random lumps of snow and chucking them around. After that we hiked down to the base of the sledding hill, and David *really* wanted to try the sled again after watching alot of kids having a blast flying down the hill at high speed. I walked him about half way up the hill, and gave him a nudge, and at that point he was hooked. He no longer cared about having me around, he was sledding with the best of them, from the highest points on the hill, as fast as he could climb to the top. Even the random few times when the run down the hill didn't go quite well, he was thoroughly amused.
On the drive home, we saw a mountain goat climbing up the hillside from the road.
More pictures are up now at the usual place and eventually over here.