I was in Steamboat last week when daytime temps were up to the mid-40s on some days, so my old pal Steve and I enjoyed a long, leisurely breakfast since there was no rush getting up to the mountain.
“My friend Lou skis every day no matter what, and even he didn’t go out yesterday,” Steve said.
The problem with moving to the mountains for the ski season, or even visiting, for that matter, is that you’re at the whim of whatever the weather dishes out. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing, though.
I’ve almost gotten to the point where I look forward to a break in powder days because it forces me to do things I wouldn’t normally do. It’s kind of like coming home to what you think is an empty kitchen and making some amazing meal from what you thought was scraps because you were forced to.
My brother and I grew up skiing in Vermont, where you were happy to get a few scraps. By that I mean finding a little snow that actually was white and not blue. It’s no coincidence some of the best skiers and boarders (a la Bode and Ross Powers) come from the East Coast, where horrible conditions forced precisely the kind of adaptability I’m talking about. We dealt with everything from frozen rain to mud, and somehow did it with a smile on our faces.
When I was younger, one of my ski instructors told us that if we sang, it would keep us warm. I’m pretty sure our crew of 8-year-old girls belting out the lyrics to a kids’ song on the North American Lift at the top of our lungs did more to disturb the peace than to elevate our body temperatures, but it distracted us nonetheless.
As we got older, the distractions from miserable conditions became more sophisticated. My brother became a pipe and park rat and I was on the varsity ski team, bashing gates with razor-sharp edges.
I had almost forgotten how bad it was until a magazine assignment took me to Stowe a few years back. The snow wasn’t bad. To the contrary, it had snowed more than a foot and a crew of local guys took me to some impressive out-of-bounds terrain with frozen waterfalls to jump off and riverbeds that wound through the tight forests like an alpine slide.
What made it distinctly Vermont was that it was at least 10 below zero with a wind-chill factor so low, no one wanted to talk about it. It was so cold my teeth hurt and bones ached, and when I did catch an edge after a botched landing it felt like I possibly had broken every bone in my body. I didn’t dare complain for the five hours we rode one run after the other, the Vermonters hooting and hollering their way down every run despite it all.
Even though I’ve been in Colorado more than a decade, it’s easy for me to snap back into that East Coast survival mode. I have a few tricks up my sleeve just to keep things interesting on those days when the grass and rocks start peeping through the snow like voyeurs pressing their noses against the glass.
For me, the best way to turn boring terrain into something more interesting is to throw on a pair of skis. Even though I skied my whole life, I’ve only strapped on the double sticks a handful of times in the past 16 years. My favorite thing to do is go out with my old friend Sarah, who lives in Carbondale. We ski raced in high school together and nothing provides more entertainment for her than watching me ski, especially since she is a PSIA level 3 certified ski instructor.
“You don’t need to get that low!” she will yell, trying to catch her breath because she’s laughing so hard. “And what are you doing with your poles? Why are you flinging them around in the air like that?”
Other days I’ll keep my snowboard and venture into the baby park, where they have little jumps and rails that are built into the ground so you can’t fall off them. My friend Christine convinced me to slide my first rail and, let me tell you, I haven’t been that nervous on snow since I peered over the edge of Corbett’s Couloir in Jackson Hole (nope, never jumped it).
So what if I fell, bruised my back and sliced my thigh open with my razor-sharp edges while singing a kids’ song? At least I wasn’t bored.
Freelance columnist Alison Berkley can be reached at alison@berkleymedia.com.
