Sophie Caldwell: Bend Camp

We're one week into our annual Bend spring camp and we've had some of the best skiing I've had in the three years I've been here. Our first day was a little wet, but for the most part we've had our fair share of sunny skies and spring skiing. Bend is one of my favorite camps of the year. It's the beginning of the training season and our main focus is logging a lot of easy volume. Each morning we usually ski for two or three hours and then in the afternoon we do some kind of dryland training. Bend is an activity paradise. You can ski (downhill or uphill), mountain bike, run, paddle, swim, climb, or really do any other kind of activity your heart desires. As much as I love skiing on snow, it's nice to break up our training with running, biking, or strength in the afternoons.

Annie, Ida, Erika, and me

One of our newest rookies, Ian Torchia (Torch) posing with his new teammates

Practicing some classic striding drills

Erika, Annie, and me with Mt. Bachelor in the background (Paddy photo)

If there's ever a day where it looks like it could be a good day for crust skiing up at the mountain, we throw in a pair of our rock skis just in case. The other day the boys headed out for an adventure while the girls did classic threshold intervals. When we got back home, they were all stoked about their ski and showing off all the pictures they took, so we made it our mission to go crust skiing the following day. We lucked out with the weather and had a beautiful sunny day to ski up into the Broken Top Bowl. I've been to Bend three times now, but this was the first time I ever did this ski and it did not disappoint. I'll let the photos speak for themselves.

Me, Sadie, Jennie, and Ida heading down from the Bowl (Bryan Fish photo)

Heading towards Broken Top with Annie

Snack breaks with Sades on top! (Erika photo)

Sodie is PSYCHED

Perfection

Goobie enjoying her first ever ski off trails

Yesterday afternoon we had a meeting with our U.S. Ski Team sponsors, Craft and L.L. Bean, where they unveiled our summer training uniforms. We are incredibly lucky to have such supportive companies providing us with training and competition gear and we're looking forward to sporting our new goods the rest of camp. We had a photo shoot with L.L. Bean on our ski this morning and we're about to head out for our Fast and Female event this afternoon. Thanks for following!