Glorious snow

In my time in Anchorage before Christmas break there was only 6 inches of snow. This left me a bit skeptical about all the hype about the great Alaskan winter. However, when I left the Lord poured forth His blessing in the form of record snowfall, and this is a little taste of what I came home to.

This is Scott, my teammate's car after Wes dug it out. If you look closely you can see the handrails just over the hood of the car are about an inch above the snow. All told there was about three feet of snow on the ground. Off of the highway I saw a fifty foot high snow pile that had been dumped from other parts of the city. Its really cool.

Wes took this picture after the snow fell. It is just really cool. Ansel Adams wishes he could have taken this shot.

This is Wes in waist deep powder. Unfortunately Wes doesn't ski so he doesn't know how to properly use powder such as this. Luckily, I brought my skis back and won't let it go to waste.

Winter Conference

I spent Dec. 27 throught Jan 3 in Portland for the annual Winter conference. It was a really refreshing time with lots of great teaching and plenty of fun with friends from all over the northwest.

This is Bryan Loritts, the main speaker for the conference. His father is Crawford Loritts, who is apparently fairly well known, but Bryan was definitely a powerful preacher. I really enjoyed him.

This is the worship band. I really enjoyed them they were a local church's band from the Portland area. The conference was held in the Portland Convention center and was made up of about 600 students.

This picture is a bit dark, but this is the masses of students who would walk the several blocks from the hotel to the convention center for each meeting. I was one of the guys who stood out on a street corner making sure people didn't get lost or jaywalk. It was a cold, boring job, but its part of being an intern. Interns get all the crappy jobs even in the ministry world.

This is a good picture that hopefully gives a feel for the size of the conference. It was a lot of people from a lot of different schools. it was pretty encouraging to see all the schools represented. The biggest groups come from schools like WSU, Idaho and Montana State, but there are also many from EWU, Nevada-Reno, as well as the Portland and Seattle areas.

No fun was had at this conference. If students acted out during the meetings they were forced to dress in these oversized suits and fight eachother in front of all their friends. It was harsh, but I think it got the point across.