Birthday Ski Safari 2018

As a lad, I lamented the proximity of my birthday to Christmas. I felt that the energy for celebration was thin by the time my annual marker came around. But as a post middle-age skier, I find that the timing is perfect, allowing me to create a nice distraction from the march towards old guy.

Now the convenient placement of my birthday, a week after New Years, is hard to deny. By then my girls have had their fill of skiing for a while. It’s a weekend to roam New York, looking for the snow, terrain and vibe that keeps me young.

Plattekill has become an integral part of my strategy for reality denial and/or postponement. Often this is my first trip to Roxbury and I push everyone I know to come out to ski.

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Coming Home to Windham

I arrived at Windham on Sunday morning delighted to find six inches of fresh snow waiting for me on the slopes. After grabbing the first chair, I skated along the ridge and made a quick descent down The Wall, a short double-black diamond headwall that connects to Whistler below.

new snow at windham

I stopped to admire the picturesque view of the Catskills on a perfect bluebird day, and I thought back to the weekend less than five years ago when my addiction to skiing was born.

In January 2013, my girlfriend (now my wife, Rachel), suggested that we spend a weekend skiing. I’d never tried the sport, but I loved exercise and was looking for a way to overcome the seasonal depression that plagued me annually during the dreary, gray days of northeast winters.

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Belleayre: Spring Forward

When schedule changes opened up my kids’ availability, I ditched my plan to drive Whiteface Saturday and sleep in the River Lot. I started thinking about Gore or Magic, both a bit over three hours drive from our home.

My sons resisted the required pre-dawn departure, so we headed to the Catskills. We left the house around 7am eager for some spring skiing. We were well on the way north before we narrowed our choice further. Being the awesome dad that I am, I decided to let the kids make the call.

They narrowed it down to Plattekill and Belleayre. Ultimately they opted for Belle, when I told them about the scheduled pond skim event. They had seen this kind of craziness for the first time last year at Mount Peter’s Springfest and got a big kick out of it.

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