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Why is it that ski instructors look so much better than mere
mortals on the hill? I’m not talking about their golden tans or
their snappy uniforms. I’m talking about how they stand tall on
their skis, the seeming effortlessness of their turns, the elegant,
melon-round lines they draw on the snow.

Take Stephen Jentzen, one of Vail’s top instructors. When Jentzen
led the way off the top of the mountain on a cottony Colorado day
last March, he cut a slender, dashing figure in blue. But what
really impressed me was the way he used simple foot and ankle
movements to tilt his skis on edge, and how the tracks he left were
perfect parallel grooves, like curving railroad tracks.

Stephen was carving. He was riding the designed-in shape of his
skis – letting them turn him – rather than muscling his boards
through a skidded turn.

“All skiing is letting go and holding on,” he said as we rode the
chair to Blue Sky Basin. “Skidding, braking, what we used to call
windshield-wiper turns – that’s holding on. Carving is letting
go.”

Letting go without giving up control. Sounds like a contradiction,
but it isn’t. It is quite simply the holy grail of snow skiing, the
not-so-mythical key to becoming a true expert.

I knew about carving – or the dream of carving, anyway. I knew how
it was supposed to work. But to really get it, to really feel it, I
decided to visit two of Colorado’s Interstate 70 giants, Vail and
Copper Mountain.

Vail, 100 miles west of Denver on the west side of its eponymous
pass, and Copper, a little closer in on the east side of the same
pass, both were having monster snow years. Base depths averaged 8
feet, and the heights of the surrounding Gore and Tenmile ranges –
often rocky and exposed – glistened with thick coats of vanilla
frosting.

Both areas are famous for their huge swaths of groomed-smooth,
green and blue (beginner and intermediate) terrain – the kind of
long, gently tilted spaces you need to practice carving. Both
resorts have highly touted ski schools. It wasn’t to be a test or a
competition. But I thought it would be fun to see how they
compared.

Jentzen has been teaching skiing for 32 years. We met in front of
the fireplace at the Golden Peak base, where he explained that
carving has been an elusive and tantalizing goal since the
invention of skis with curved sides. Picture a ski’s plan shape:
wide fore body, narrow waist, wide tail. Place a ski on edge and it
will trace an arc equal to this built-in radius.

The trouble was, the long, narrow skis that were standard the past
70 years came with built-in radii of 45 meters or more. Only the
sport’s ham-thighed geniuses could ride these relatively straight
sticks in pure-carve mode.

Comes the revolution
The rest of us had trouble handling arcs that big, and the speed
that accompanied them. We learned to twist and skid; every turn was
a compromise between letting go and holding on.

But the 1990s saw a design and materials revolution that now allows
every skier to at least approximate the carves of the ski gods.
It’s akin to the revolutions in tennis rackets (sweet spots as big
as Rhode Island), in super-forgiving golf clubs, or mountain bikes
with disc brakes and full suspensions.

Ski-makers combined shorter lengths with Mae West proportions to
bring the intrinsic turn radius down to 25 meters, then 15, then
(in a modern slalom shape) to a whippet-quick 8 meters. Now, in
theory at least, we can carve at relatively slow speeds all over
the mountain.

Jentzen showed me how to make railroad tracks on the catwalk across
to Cloud 9.

“To start, you need a pitch so gentle you’d feel comfortable
running it straight,” he said. Once we were coasting along, he had
me tilt my right ski up on the little toe side. “Right edge to go
right.” The left ski followed suit as if on its own.

Then we switched and tipped the left ski on its left (little toe)
edge. Both skis curved to the left. We stopped and looked back at
tracks that appeared to have been engraved, the tools on our feet
slicing rather than scraping the snow.

Together we ranged across Vail’s vastness, from distant Blue Sky
Basin (6 miles from the village) to the alabaster bathtub of
Poppyfields in China Bowl. We never skied the same run twice and we
didn’t come back down to the base until the day was done.

An expanse of “king’s cloth”
That’s a big part of Vail’s draw. It is huge – 33 lifts, 3,450
vertical feet, 5,289 acres – the single biggest ski mountain in
North America. Snowcats groom an average of 1,200 to 1,600 acres
every night, leaving in their wake what skiers call “corduroy,”
the minutely ribbed, exquisitely carvable “king’s cloth.”

The expansiveness works inside you as well. Learning is easy when
you have mile after uninterrupted mile to reinforce the movements.
And, what’s more poetic, you feel as if you’re flying above the
valleys as you glide from region to region, bowl to bowl.

The Euro scale is not surprising when you consider that Vail’s
founders were 10th Mountain Division veterans who fought in Italy
and saw the Alps firsthand. They brought a European sensibility to
the village as well.

Things were quite different over the pass at Copper Mountain.
Copper sprang full-blown along the banks of Tenmile Creek during
the winter of 1972-73. The mountain was universally lauded,
especially its natural terrain divisions – beginners and experts
rarely get in one another’s way – but the high-rise condo village
suffered the same slight as Gertrude Stein’s hometown of Oakland,
Calif.: There was no there there.

Copper’s public spaces have no old skis on the walls, no
black-and-white photos of skiing’s pioneers; there’s no history
here, really. But now Intrawest, the Vancouver-based conglomerate
(Whistler-Blackcomb, Mount Tremblant, Mammoth Mountain), owns the
resort, and “there” has been transformed into a place of
near-constant stimulation.

Coming off the mountain, I was greeted in The Burning Stones Plaza
by U2’s “Beautiful Day” pumping from stadium-sized speakers. Kids of all ages flipped their skis and snowboards
out of the machine-sculpted superpipe (think of salmon leaping) just up the hill.

A carving lesson
My adventure came the next day in the form of a carving lesson with
Paul Cunningham, a 41-year-old Boston native who has been teaching
at Copper for five years. If Stephen Jentzen and Vail follow an
orderly, Mozartian progression, then Cunningham and Copper dance to
a more free-form beat: Bobby McFerrin, perhaps, or – why not – the
Street Boys of New York.

Cunningham is a big-picture guy. He thinks of carving “as
offensive skiing versus defensive skiing. Skidding is defensive. In
a carved turn, the tail follows the tip, the ski is always moving
forward, cutting its groove in the snow.”

Mostly, Cunningham didn’t talk; he led, and I followed. On
Soliloquy, the perfect rolling, dipping green trail on the area’s
western edge, he brought out his bag of tricks. It included
slow-speed railroad track exercises like Jentzen’s. But he also
gave me more visceral challenges.

“Change edges early in the arc,” he said, “well before the fall
line. Then lighten up through the bottom of the turn when the
forces are greatest. Try not to ‘park-and-ride.’ In other words,
don’t just assume the position and stand there. You want to be
fluid, flowing.”

Cunningham took me up to Rendezvous, a timberline saddle between
Copper and Union peaks with miles of open blue and green runs.
(Like Vail, Copper is blessed with easy terrain up high, where
anybody can feel the air at 11,000-plus feet and look the alpine
snowfields straight in the eye.) Here Cunningham opened up the
throttle and banked his body more severely to the inside.

“The higher the speed, the greater the centrifugal force,” he
said, saving his comments for the lift rides, talking with his
hands. “The greater the centrifugal force, the more edge angle you
need.”

It made sense in a wonderfully circular way: A curved edge cuts a
groove in the snow and is in turn deflected by that snow groove.
Centrifugal force wants to straighten my curving line, wants to
hurl me off the merry-go-round. I resist by leaning in, by in effect placing the soles of
my feet against the tiny wall my skis are carving in the snow.

Eureka! A pure-carved turn is a carnival ride of rock-solid
stability. Cunningham grinned. He didn’t need to say more. He knew
to let the dome of blue sky over Vail Pass preside over our delight
as down and down we went, standing tall, leaning in, letting the
skis etch precise semicircles in the beautifully manicured shapes
of the mountain.

Peter Shelton is a former ski-school director and born-again carver
who lives in Montrose. His latest book is “Climb to Conquer: The
Untold Story of WWII’s 10th Mountain Division Ski Troops.”