With the snow covered mountains of Lake Tahoe a distant memory, it was with much enthusiasm that I donned my Glenn Plake T-shirt and caught a sequence of trains and buses to arrive at the Fillmore & Lombard stop.

It didn’t take much to work out which way to walk from there, just head for the hills. An impressive and somewhat surreal sight of a snowy street greeted me as I looked up along Fillmore.

Possibly even more surreal than the last out-of -place ski-slope I witnessed at London’s Covent Garden a few years back.

Despite being early afternoon on a workday, there was a strong and up-for-it crowd lining the ski-slope.

What with the sun being fairly vicious I would have preferred to have made my way up the shadowy side of the road, however in order to make any progress at all I was forced to brave the hot side sans-sunscreen.

A mixture of snowboarders and skiers were wooing the audience with the thrills and spills of a sizable jump, and with each drop-in the crowd built the atmosphere up to a crescendo of stomping feet.
Despite the impossibly slow moving sidewalk areas I was able to catch a good view of the proceedings from several angles.

There was a strong presence from the SF Fire Dept. who were presumably there to put out smoldering backsides of those skiers who slid butt-first along the bristly run-offs of astro-turf in true comedy style.

As for the results – I didn’t hang around to find out. But as for a successful event I think it was worth the wait and hopefully the locals enjoyed it enough to allow a 31st birthday party next year without too much fuss.