It’s been dumping for two days straight in Aspen, with more than 2 feet accumulating on my porch by last Friday.
There’s nothing like an early season powder day to remind me why I live in the mountains.
I’ve been waking up when it’s still dark out, suited up and ready to go by 7 a.m. even though the lifts don’t open until 9. I’m perfectly happy sitting around the house in my snowboard gear, sipping hot tea and filling my gullet with a big breakfast to last until lunch.
All of a sudden, I want to be in bed by 10 instead of out at one of a dozen holiday parties. My sleep, and saving my energy for a long day on the slopes, is more important to me than socializing. It’s like the old saying: “No friends on a powder day.”
The early-season snow has also made me nostalgic for all those amazing experiences I’ve had in years past.
I remember getting in the lift maze in Jackson Hole at 7 in the morning to make the first tram at 9 a.m., laying all my clothes out the night before so I could get dressed half asleep. Before the out-of-bounds gates were permanently opened, the protocol in Jackson was to be in tram line by 7:30 a.m.
Trying to get on the “first box,” as it was known, is a tricky proposition. Only 62 bodies could pack into the tram, minus however many Ski Patrol and ski instructors cut the line with their clients. The tram maze has cold, black metal rails four rows deep, sort of like what you find at an amusement park ride. You could gauge your chances of making it on – anyone in the first row and a half had a pretty good shot. After that, there was no telling.
We’d put our boards in line and then go to the “AC,” the Alpine Café, for a breakfast sandwich and coffee. The rule was if you weren’t back by 8, your board would get tossed out of line. That meant you had to sit on those cold metal rails for an hour and wait. But it was actually kind of fun – one big social hour when all the locals were together before spreading out on the mountain’s massive terrain.
First Box was worth the wait. It meant fresh tracks down the Headwall and wherever else you chose to go. It was a small price to pay for pitch after pitch of perfect powder with consistent fall-line vertical unlike any other ski resort in the world. The hardest part was trying to decide if you should stay on the upper mountain or enjoy one long top-to-bottom run and wait in tram line again.
Aspen is a lot more straightforward. More often than not, it takes awhile for Ski Patrol to get the best terrain open. That means fresh tracks in, say, Highlands Bowl or the Face of Bell on Aspen Mountain is possible in the mid-day.
I remember a particularly epic day last year when I spent a whole hour sitting in the snow waiting for Ski Patrol to drop the gate at the G Zones at Aspen Highlands at around 12:30. There was a big clan of us, maybe a couple dozen rosy-cheeked locals who fancied ourselves the luckiest people on earth just to be sitting around up on Highlands Bowl shooting the breeze like we were at some college party.
I got my face shots and my bottomless turns and floated down that thing like I had wings. Nothing else really mattered. And that was the beauty of it. As I hiked Highlands Bowl for the third time that day, Ski Patrol had raised the “Epic” flag, which summed up my feelings exactly.
It’s days like those that define what my life is all about, and I hope I’ll be doing it for a long time to come. I’ve always imagined I would be one of those cool older ladies with weathered skin and “smile lines” (a term used by women who are OK with their wrinkles and/or afraid of Botox) and long gray braids who still snowboards every day. I want to be that famous old-timer local people would see in the Loge Peak liftline and say, “Oh my God, she’s been here for-EV-er, and she still totally rips.” They would write about me in the newspaper when I turned 102 and became the oldest living passholder in Aspen, and May Enyon, the social columnist for The Aspen Times, would write a column about my birthday party.
All I can say is, another powder day definitely makes all my troubles go away.
Freelance columnist Alison Berkley can be reached at alison@berkleymedia.com.
