Well I’m not sure what just happened, no I’m not talking politics, something far more important. The change of seasons! I feel like I was just at work with the air conditioner struggling to keep the shop uh, not sweltering, while complaining because it was too hot. Today it may not get out of the thirties and the wind on the ridges will gust to one hundred miles an hour, I guess we won’t be going out to do that ride up on my favorite ridgeline today. Oh yeah, that trail has seven inches of snow on it too! Not that that’s a bad thing.
I always feel like summer scoots along pretty quickly. Crazy days at work, over crowded roads, beautiful days out in the woods and on the lake, and of course waking up every morning hoping for no fires. Nothing ruins a summer like huffing smoke, then getting your town evacuated only to return to find your home in ashes. Fortunately, I have only experienced two of those three things…so far.
Summer is pretty much guaranteed, it will be warm, mostly dry and really fun in a huge variety of flavors. Then summer unofficially ends sometime in September. I can hear the screeching brakes. I swear time slows down for me as we get through the fall months. Now don’t get me wrong here because I do love a good Indian Summer (are we still allowed to call it that?). Things mellow out around town, work load backs off a bit, the temperatures get nice, especially at night which at least for me makes for better sleep. But, yeah and I do mean a big but, for myself and I know a lot of others around here, we can’t think about anything else but winter’s arrival.
As the Autumn progresses, albeit ever so slowly, we get to that point where the conditions make it hard to do anything in the mountains. We’ve gotten some snow, not enough to slide on but too much to ride or hike so it kind of shuts down upper elevation fun. Most people have pulled their boats from the lake, rivers are too low for paddling. You can see us walking around town, unmistakable, the offseason zombies, (see my article offseason zombies) needing to go do something out there but stuck in between. Time is moving so slowly, week after week, was that a week because it felt like a month! What we still have two months to go before we can ski?
How is it that time can seem to skew so pervasively? Is there some space time continuum or as I would call it, a ski time continuum that changes our perception of…when is it going to be winter!?!
There are people out there that will say there is something to this time warping thing, but of course it lies more in our own perception than in time somehow skipping around and messing with our poor little fun starved minds.
There are many studies that have been done on this. One of the more recent and relatable was done by neuroscientist, author, technologist and researcher on time perception Richard Engleman who shows that when our brains are less engaged and less stimulated, we tend to take fewer snapshots of the moments and events. This “less filled in” period Engleman says makes it feel like time is passing more slowly. Whereas if we are more stimulated doing things, especially new exciting and adventuresome things, our brains take many more snapshots of the time spent, thus making it feel more full and like time is passing more quickly. Time flies when you’re having fun! Yeah yeah Richard, we just want to hear that there are some storms coming in soon and that we had better get ready because they are going to be big, that will speed up those snapshots in my brain!
Yes I agree with many of the summer folks out there, summer in Tahoe is an amazing gift that we truly love to be a part of. Autumn in Tahoe is so alive even though many of the animals, the plants and trees are shutting down, going into their winter dormancy, (yeah too bad about all those critters that don’t like to play in the winter) what a lovely time of year, no wonder they call it Indian Summer. But it still passes to slowly!
Then we start to get all the new ski and board videos coming out, you know to ”fuel the stoke bra!” Yeah, I can’t even watch them this early because the only thing it fuels is the angst. Oh and then there are the weather prognosticators telling us it’s going to be La Nina, El Nino, I say we just call it La Familia because no matter what, we are in Tahoe and we sit right on the knifes’ edge meaning we might get the storms and we might not get them. That sounds like an average Tahoe winter which will be just great, but those big ones are way more fun!
We wait, take some snapshots and hope someone will get their foot off the brakes because I am excited for the magic of winter at Tahoe.
Let’s play