I love snow. I love to play on snow, that means almost anything that slides on snow, well I do draw the line at sleds and saucers, you know, toys for the unskilled. Mainly because those two seem like the most dangerous way to slide, no brakes and no steering?!? I’m also not that picky about where because almost anywhere that I can do that sliding is good with me, ski resort, backcountry, meadows, beaches (a lucky thing that we get around these parts), neighborhood streets, frozen lakes, although that is called ice skating which counts too. Which brings up another factor here which is I don’t really care what the snow condition is, can I slide on it? I’m going. It makes me think of one of the times we skied Mount Shasta, nearing the summit we meet two other people. We are hiking with boot crampons and our skis on our packs, the other two have left their skis at a point somewhere below. One of them says, “Why are you bringing your skis up, there’s no good snow up there?” I reply, “I can see white stuff to the top, I am skiing it!” We all hang out at the top for a while. The other two leave before us…walking down from the summit. It’s a perfect day so we spend another forty minutes simply enjoying being there, then click into our skis and begin the drop back down. The snow is sun and wind affected, not great snow but great to be skiing from the summit. It doesn’t take long before we catch our two buddies still WALKING down to the spot they left their skis. As we fly past them with a Yahoo! It didn’t look like they were enjoying their walk downhill to their skis at all!
Yeah, okay kind of like the sleds and saucers there are two snow conditions I can skip; breakable death crust and frozen death cookies, hmmm, those both have the word death in them, guess I’ll stay home and get some chores done, chores yuk.
I do spend a good deal of my skiing days at the ski resorts. Who can complain about being whisked up a mountainside in minutes so you can blissfully slide back down to do it again. Oh yeah, lots of complainers out there about that, and for good reason, long lines, out of control and or disrespectful others doing the same, Vail. I don’t want to be one of those grumpy old dudes going, “Oh skiing was so much better back in the day, that was the golden age of skiing!” uh but…
Our world of sliding on snow really has changed a lot. I feel very lucky to have grown up with parents who were skiers in the 50s and were passionate enough to have had a cabin on the North Shore to come spend weekends with friends and family enjoying the magic of sliding on snow. I don’t remember my very first years on snow but at about five or six years old some of those memories begin to come to shape. Those are absolutely some of my best memories in life skiing around with Mom and Dad and our friends. That part of the day when everybody else in the group was headed into lodge but my Dad was still getting me to go for “Just a couple more runs” but I want to go in, my fingers are too cold, “Okay one more.”
The excitement of driving to the mountain all loaded into the station wagon, some things never change. A lift line was one lane wide and there might have been eight people in front of you, some things really change! Only gonna get one more run because my fingers are too cold, some things never change.
One of my favorite things at the ski resort is seeing the little kids out there charging around. They are so good at such a young age and it is fun to see those that are really moving around the mountain, helmets and cool outfits, great equipment and in such an enthusiastic way, no crybabies! Actually, it seems like the cry babies are usually some adult sitting in the middle of the run or some nut on their powder skis whining about how shitty the snow is, not the little kids, they just want to point ‘em downhill!
Possibly the coolest, dare I say cutest thing is how little they are making snowboards for the really young kids! There is this Mom and her little daughter I have seen up there several times, that little girls is going to be amazing very soon. Those little ones will some day be the heart and passion of this gift of mountains we have been given. I hope they will be able to save the soul of skiing and boarding that the corporate disease that is rampant right now is killing so fast.
The golden age of skiing? I am not sure there has ever been any one golden age. It has all been hanging out in the mountains playing with snow and gravity. I would love to time travel back to the thirties and forties to experience skiing back then. Those people were hard core real skiers, you had to want it, wood, leather and wool, no groomed slopes and either walk up or if you were lucky a rope tow. Not to mention the difficulty of reaching a ski hill by car or train. Maybe that was the iron age of skiing and now we in the marshmallow age, no, it is all the golden age and I’m glad to get to be a part of it. Oh, it’s starting to snow, I am going skiing!