Hi! My name is Mitch and I am a senior in high school, living in Park City Utah. I love to snowboard and I work up at Park City Resort as a liftee during the winters.

My friend Alex recently moved to California this last year and is coming to visit me in a couple weeks. We have been best friends since I was in the first grade and I miss him greatly. Alex and I love to snowboard together and we are planning on going every day for the week that he is here.

It is starting to snow and the resorts are getting ready to open this weekend, so the anticipation of Alex coming into town is really growing on me. He comes in a week and I have to start this weekend finding all of the secret spots we always go to in order to find the biggest cliffs and the deepest powder.

Alex comes tomorrow and so I ask my friend Chris if Alex can borrow his season pass to Park City so that Alex doesn’t have to pay for a ticket while he is here this week. It takes a lot of baiting for Chris to give me the pass but he finally does, saying, “Don’t loose it.”

I say “of course not bro, I will take care of it. No worries.”

I drive down to the Salt Lake airport to pick him up. Wow, the excitement is building.
I am thinking to myself and wondering if he has changed or if I will recognize him.
Sure enough, I did recognize him and I pick him up, saying “Wow bro it is so awesome to see you I have been waiting so long for this day to come. How was the trip, did it go smoothly?”
Alex responds “I know its great to see you, the flight was easy. Wow, it feels like home, I miss the snow, the mountains, and most of all you, Mitch.”
So we get in my car and head up Parley’s Canyon on the way up to my house. Alex asks me, “Have you been up on the slopes at all this week?”
“Yeah, I have gone every day after school and the snow is incredible. It has snowed every night for the last week and it is supposed to snow two feet between tonight and tomorrow,” I reply.
“Wow, that sounds amazing, I am so excited to get on my new board and cruise with you. Is it good if we go pretty easy tomorrow so that I can get the hang of my new board and make sure I feel comfortable?” asks Alex.
“Yeah, of course, bro, no hurry, I just love being with you, like old times.” I reply.
Then we get home and talk for a while about life and catch up on all the ladies that we both have been dating and how beautiful all of the California chicks are compared to the Mormon chicks in Utah. But we are starting to get tired and want to be rested for a long day of snowboarding tomorrow.
We wake up in the morning to the smell of cinnamon rolls and we both look at each other and Alex says “Oh my gosh, I love your mom, she is the best.”
That’s all that needed to be said. We both knew that we were about to taste a little piece of heaven. So we walk down there and eat the cinnamon rolls. My mom asks Alex “How’s the hustle and bustle down in California?”
Alex responds, “Everything is going well, but I am happy to be back, I miss you guys.”
Then my mom shows us in the newspaper that they recorded 38 inches of snow in the last 24 hours and that there is extremely high avalanche danger. My mom says, “You boys better be careful and not go too hard since it is Alex’s first day of the season.”
“Oh don’t worry, Mom we are just going to cruise today and Alex doesn’t want to go hard anyways. Plus we know our limits and won’t be stupid,” I tell her.
Now we head over there and I give Alex Chris’ pass. He is a little sketched out about the whole thing since he knew everyone there and they would know he is not Chris, but he wore it anyway.

We take Bonanza up and are fine and Alex just goes down his first run going easy. He realizes that it just comes right back, and he doesn’t have to worry at all, saying, “Man I love my new board and I feel so comfortable. Let’s just go hit some powder, I don’t need to take it easy.”
I am excited and say “Are you sure you don’t want to take it easy? Well, that’s goo,d because I would probably rather die than ride runs like that all day.”
Alex replies “Oh, well, you better be careful what you wish for,” jokingly.
Then I knock on the wood chairlift for good luck so I don’t die. We get off the chair and decide we are going to go to our famous out of bounds area on the backside of the mountain.
We get there and realize that it is blocked off due to high avalanche danger but I am determined to go. So I tell Alex, “Well, let’s just go anyway,”
“Hell no, I don’t want to die in an avalanche. It’s not worth it,” replies Alex.
I told Alex that I would leave him if he didn’t go, and I even told him that he could go first, in case something happened I could help him out.
Alex decides he is going to go first and is actually really scared with a bad feeling in his stomach, but he goes anyway. Before he goes he says, “I love you, man, you are the best friend a man could ever have.”
I stood there, confused and happy at the same time, wondering what caused him to say something like that.
Then I jump off the cliff and make a perfect landing with Alex at the bottom screaming and cheering me on the whole way down until I hear a CRACK and look down, realizing I just started an avalanche and it was going straight for Alex. I started screaming and he just yelled, “I love you Mitch, you are the best friend ever,” and so I knew what had happened. He knew this was comoing and that’s why he was so scared. Then I heard a crack in the sky and had a feeling that Alex was not dead and I needed to go find him. So I went down and started to smell something really good. I realized that it smelt like a cinnamon roll so I dug and dug, finally getting to his head, but he was unconscious.
Then I was just going to quit and screamed “AHHHH,” but I heard another voice telling me to slap him across the face. I felt weird about it but I did it. He opened his eyes. “Oh my gosh! He’s alive and I saved his life!” I said to myself.