Of Snowmobiles and Trees

       When I was 15 years old, my family and I spend our spring break skiing in California. Now, this is probably not a terribly usual statement, but bear with me. My little sister is extremely susceptible to altitude sickness, so the usual ski resorts in Colorado aren't really an option for us - we have to go to the ones that aren't quite as high. Lake Tahoe, on the border between Nevada and California, has a lot of really good lower elevation skiing, so we go there a lot.
        We had been skiing for a few days and decided to take the day off to do something different. We'd been snowmobiling before - a couple years before, I think - and we'd really enjoyed it then, so we decided to try it again.
        I'd recently gotten my driver's permit, so I begged my parents to allow me to drive a snowmobile on my own. They were reluctant, but they agreed. As it turns out, this was a mistake, but at the time I was super excited. The guide explained how to work everything and then we all put our helmets on and hit the trails.
       At first it was a little scary, driving the snowmobile - in order to get it to turn, you have to really throw your weight around, and I wasn't really that big or that strong at the time. I was at the back of the group because I was going much slower than everyone else, trying to figure out how to work this thing.
       We finally reached our destination - a large open meadow - and the guide let us race around in big circles. Around this point, I was starting to feel more comfortable with the snowmobile, and less like I was liable to crash into something at any moment. So I started racing around, going as fast as I could (and sometimes a little faster than was probably wise) and racing against my siblings, who were being allowed to drive as long as we just stayed in the meadow.
          I'd been having a lot of fun going fast in the meadow, so when we started back down the trail I felt a little more confident about picking up some speed. Apparently our guide felt confident about that as well, because he up and took off - I have no idea how fast he was going, because the spedometer on my snowmobile was broken - and my dad and sister (who was riding with him) took off after him. I really wanted to keep up, so I took off after them - and the skis on the front of my snowmobile caught on something, some rut in the road, and sent me careening off the path and directly into a huge tree.
        Here's the thing about crashing into trees - they don't move. Like, at all. So I did a (very graceful) somersault through the windshield on the front of my snowmobile, over a branch and into a snowdrift. It was one of the absolute scariest experiences of my life, and I was so hopped up on adrenaline that I didn't even notice I was injured at first. I scrambled back up the side of the path - we were on a mountain, everything's on an incline - and literally the only thing going through my head was, "Oh, my gosh, I broke the snowmobile, we're going to have to pay for it, Mom and Dad are going to kill me."
         My mom and brother had been behind me on the trail, and they'd seen my spectacular fail. They pulled over and Mom was off the snowmobile like a shot, wanting to see whether or not I was ok. I told her that I was fine, that I was so sorry about the snowmobile - she didn't seem too worried about that, though, because she was so relieved that I wasn't dead - or hurt, as we thought at the time. She told me to go and sit over on her snowmobile while she went and looked at the damage, and I agreed.
         As I sat down on the snowmobile, I glanced down at my leg. The pants I was wearing were ripped a little on my right thigh, and I thought to myself, "Great. Just great." I pulled at the rip to look at my leg, having learned from experience that ripped clothing typically meant an injury of some sort, only to see that a chunk of my leg was missing. I put the cloth back down, carefully, and called to my mother. "Mom? I think I took a chunk out of my leg."
       They drove me to the hospital - I'm not sure if I was in shock or not, but I remember crying pretty much the whole way there for whatever reason (it wasn't even the pain) - and I had 3 layers of 26 stitches put in. I had refused to look at my injury until it was stitched up, so I don't actually know how bad it looked before it was stitched up - the little glimpse I got of it when I noticed my pants were ripped was just that, little - but the scar on my right thigh is very impressive. Needless to say, I am never allowed within 15 feet of a snowmobile again.