Dear Readers who regularly devour my weekly Revelations know that I have already written at length on the subject of Why Skiers Are Better than Everyone Else. Last Friday I was reminded of my timeless prose as I spent 45 minutes traversing a very short stretch of road that connects I-80 to Route 89, my proscribed path to Alpine Meadows. As I voluntarily descended into this automotive miasma, I could make out the dim form of the interstate traffic snaking down from the west, two dense strands of tightly linked vehicles stretching beyond the horizon.
If you’ve been a lifelong skier, you’ve not only experienced failure; most likely you’ve survived at least one miscalculation so soul-scarring, its time capsule is enshrined in the halls of memory alongside weddings and funerals.
As inspiration and prod to memory, allow me to recount a vignette from my days as a freestyle competitor. The location is Keystone, Colorado, the event, The Chicken of the Sea Freestyle Classic, a sponsorship coup that couldn’t have been too tough to land as Ralston Purina owned both the resort and the tuna.
I qualified via a preliminary aerial competition, taking a conservative tack by throwing a mule kick, hardly daring when going upside down was common. But my modest move was clean and hung out to dry, with a barely discernible, weightless pause at its apex.
Every day I get the chance to ski is better than a day I don’t. I may get rained on, pelted with grapple with the density of ball bearings, scorched by winds that would fell a rainforest, feel my legs wobble a half hour into a six-hour day and on any given morning an...
I’m not anti-social, but left with the choice of skiing by myself or not skiing at all, I’m going skiing. I suppose part of me, the walled-off writer part, is happily misanthropic, but my skiing self is inherently social. The best ski days are those shared with family...
Once upon a time, the family of alpine skiers was a relatively tight-knit bunch of risk-takers regarded by the general public as a lunatic clan whose members seemed to spend half of each winter wearing a cast or sling, yet continued to ski, as if such injuries were...
