Mt. Aggie

The best class that I ever took in college was snow skiing. Yep, that's right. In College Station, TX during the spring semester I took Snow Skiing as a class. This was made possible by an engineering marvel at Texas A&M university affectionately named Mt. Aggie.

Mt. Aggie is a large structure on west campus built mainly out of steel, wood and concrete -- and then covered in white AstroTurf. The grain of the AstroTurf points "downhill" and a soaker-style sprinkler system is installed on the fake mountain to moisten the AstroTurf in order to make it suitable for skiing with regular snow skis. It works, I promise.

There are two "runs" on Mt. Aggie. A beginner side that always stays the same, and an advanced side complete with moguls and jumps.

The main mistake the creators of Mt. Aggie made was that they put a flat space at the bottom of the mountain, followed by a large speed bump, followed by a grassy space, followed by a chain link fence.

As you may have already imagined, the speed bump did not slow novice skiers down, instead it acted as a frightening jump at the end of the run. Skiers would launch off of the speed bump, into the chain link fence and land in the nasty puddle of dirty runoff created from the sprinkler system on the mountain. If you were not a good skier you ended up soaking wet and gross.

I found one picture on all of the internet of Mt.Aggie. As evidenced by the skier at the top left of the picture, Mt. Aggie doesn't mind if you ski in shorts and a t-shirt.