On the fifth day we went to Crystal Mountain which is about two hours outside Seattle. I was very impressed with the size of Crystal Mountain and thought it was comparable to most other US mountains I’d been to before. Below is a picture of the six of us at the top of one of the lifts (but not the highest gondola).

Below are additional pictures from our morning at Crystal Mountain:

The morning was great fun but at some point I decided to go through some trees. I ended up falling into a tree knee-first and hurt what I think was my MCL. After a few minutes I was able to get up and snowboard down the mountain but I was pretty sore. We decided to all ride the main gondola up to the top of the mountain and get a late lunch at a restaurant up there. After lunch we snowboarded a few more runs and then called it for the day as the mountain was starting to close down. Below is a picture of Grainne and I with Mt. Rainier in the background.

Below are additional pictures from the top of Crystal Mountain:

After we left for the day, the original plan was to go back to Crystal Mountain the following day for our fourth and final day of snowboarding. However, because a few of us were pretty beat-up (including me!), in the morning we decided to skip Crystal Mountain and head into Seattle for the day. We hadn’t planned to spend any time in Seattle this trip but it seemed like a fun and relaxing thing to do instead of another hard (but fun) day on the mountains. Click here to see our day in Seattle.