We skiers are a resilient lot.
We have to be. The sport that feels embedded in the most elemental fibers of our being requires winter. I realize that last statement isn’t entirely true, but anyone who mistakes indoor skiing or sliding on sand or grass or nylon filaments for the real deal is in a deep state of denial. The essence of skiing is inseparable from mountains and snow, bringing powerful forces to bear on any and all who dare to brave both.
One of skiing’s baked-in ironies is that the skiing is best when you can’t get to it. The same storms that dump their abundant goodness on the mountains also visit all the roads that lead there, often rendering any attempt at access an extended exercise in impatience.
Then there are days like last Saturday, when a prophesized atmospheric river flowed across northern California like an inland tsunami. I realize there are exotic locales, like New England, where rain and snow often move in tandem, with the rain frequently arriving second, so as to obliterate whatever snow – and hope – that might have preceded it.
But in this instance, the rains came first, and they burst open with a Biblical vengeance, saturating the forlorn, dormant ground in no time. I awoke in Reno on the last day of 2022 to discover that I now was the proprietor of small lakeside community that was taking shape in my basement. Water was sluicing down walls and cascading from the corners of shelving. My liquid assets were swelling around my feet faster than tattered towels could absorb them. To take my mind off my hopeless predicament, I pondered how I could pull off a real estate boondoggle such as, “Lago di Hoginini: buy your Tuscan-styled lot now, while it’s still above water!”
Eventually, a good friend, a couple of wet vacs and a change in the weather caused the waters of Lago di Hoginini to recede to pre-flood levels. But while we were celebrating this triumph over adversity, silver-dollar-size snowflakes were accumulating faster than IHOP can make flapjacks. Plunging temperatures then froze the whole kit and kaboodle into a solid mass with the molecular weight of molybdenum.
It was a bad night to be an old tree. The weight of the frozen-stiff snow dropped aged limbs below their threshold of resilience, snapping off 20-foot long branches like dried kindling. Rose bushes that had survived pestilence and drought since FDR’s first term lost major limbs overnight. An old peach tree right outside our kitchen window from which Oscar Wilde (the cat, not the 19th-century British wit) could jump to the sill was leveled when a massive sheet of sodden snow slid off our steeply pitched metal roof with enough momentum to uproot it. Its fall caved in the back of a metal chaise longue like it was a soggy Pringle.
In a word, I was stymied. Skiing would have to wait.
The Great Chain of Being
If you were reading this Revelation – or listening to it in podcast form – in Elizabethan times, you might have believed in the Great Chain of Being worldview, that the orbits of Man and Nature are so intertwined that disruptions in one induces tumult in the other. I’m dusting off the concept here as I feel the paroxysm that Nature recently unleashed locally is perhaps a harbinger of change across the ski landscape.
How and where skis are sold, and how information about skis is presented and disseminated – once well-established conduits – are evolving with every passing season. One reason I continue to toil in these vineyards is because the specialty ski shop – home to the world’s best bootfitters – is an endangered species. If we lose the ability to accurately fit the skier, the gulf between the sport’s elite and the public – already a giant rift – will be complete. The sport we love will become an activity, like pickleball or cornhole. So, I want to support the shops that continue to make skiing more than just “accessible;” they help make it transformative.
While my tone might come off as “erudite curmudgeon,” I see my role as more cold-eyed realist than over-wrought alarmist. Just about every ski brand you’ve ever heard of – and all of the ones you haven’t, of which there are legions – is working overtime to build their direct-to-consumer channel. It would be poor corporate governance not to. So, this behavior is here to stay.
Meanwhile, the new product renewal machinery marches on. Today, shops in this region will get their first gander at the 23/24 model line-up, and on-snow demos will follow in due course. The mechanics of the sell-in cycle will hold together for at least another season. But there’s little doubt that further changes are more likely than a stable status quo.
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Road Tripping
Among the many dissatisfactions of this most unusual season is that travel beyond one’s local environs has been roundly discouraged. Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful down to my socks that we’re allowed to ski locally, and my version of same is pretty sweet. Pardon the plug, but between Alpine Meadows, Squaw Valley and Mt. Rose I have a smorgasbord of savory choices.
But skiing close to home and skiing on the road are two different beasts. Nothing is the same, really, and therein lies a great deal of the road trip’s charms.
To shed light on my premise, allow me to pull back the veil on my favorite away game, an annual pilgrimage to Little Cottonwood Canyon. By the end of this brief travelogue you will probably hate me, so please fill your vessel of good will to the rim before proceeding.
It’s About Nothing
In the last week of January,2009 I was able to spend a few days skiing in Little Cottonwood Canyon, which is always cathartic for my ravaged soul. The conditions were all over the map, the mountains having experienced a long, hot spell followed by rain, grapple, wet snow and finally dry snow driven by winds that could flense an adult walrus in a few minutes. Couldn’t have been better.
I had been preparing for the trip for weeks, psychologically. Two back surgeries the previous winter had reduced my training regimen from semi-annual to non-existent. Scheduling conflicts such as work kept me from visiting the areas that abound at home near Lake Tahoe, so I had zero ski days on a body with more fat on it than a French duck. I had as much chance of surviving Snowbird and Alta as a rib roast in a piranha tank.
Fortunately, the Lord is merciful, anti-inflammatory drugs are powerful and there are techniques that allow one to block out pain. There are also many wonderful people in this world with which to ski, kind people who stand quietly by, pretending to be in awe of Nature, while my chest heaves so violently in its futile quest for oxygen that tiny lung particles break lose and make for the exits. One such person is Guru Dave Powers, a man whose passion for the sport hasn’t diminished after thousands of days of riding gravity down the infinitely variable slopes and crannies of Snowbird. The Goo knows this hill, and in knowing it well knows so much more.
The Making of a Skier, Chapter XII: Putting Words into the Mouth of God & Other Mid-Life Adventures
When I was cut adrift by Head on June 13, 2001, my once glowing prospects dimmed considerably. The date is etched in memory because I hosted a small soirée that evening in honor of my darling wife’s 50th birthday. One of the attendees was Paul Hochman, who would play several roles in my life as I wandered in the wilderness of unemployment during what were supposed to be my peak earning years.
During the gaping hole in my career that spanned 2001-2011, I would eventually spend every cent of my inheritance, plus most of what I’d saved from earlier bouts with gainful employment, just keeping the household afloat. Despite a river of red ink, my resume would suggest that I was not only commercially active during this epoch, but had my hand in all sorts of ventures.
