As winter settled in on our first year living in Italy, my husband began to turn his sights on snow boarding in the Italian Alps. Every year as he anticipates the first snow fall he starts to get the itch to strap on his snow board and hit the tree runs. He watches each snow fall with keen interest and studies carefully the snow pack. Having grown up in Northern California he became very good at snow boarding, even working for part of his teenage years at a ski resort in the Sierra Mountains.