A Simple Twist of Fate

Since I was 6 years old I’d always had a season pass at Hunter Mountain. My parents, Dorothy and Jack skied Hunter and Dad was a ski instructor there for a long time. After they moved to Florida; Orville Slutzky, still comped my son and me a season pass every year. An act of generosity I’ll always remember.

At the time, I didn’t have many friends/acquaintances that skied. Those that did wanted to go on to Vermont instead of going to Hunter. I’d ski Hunter with my son or by myself. Once he went away to college I either went to Hunter by myself or with a couple of guys from work. Since I’m a teacher, I also skied one night a week with my school ski club.

My wife was never too interested, but as my daughter and youngest son got older, I took them with me and we had a great time. I was getting out probably 30+ times a year, either alone, with my kids, with the occasional friend or on a school trip.

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Hunter Mtn, NY: 4/2/10

Hunter Mountain

Forecast today for the Catskills was sunny with a high around 75, so my daughters and I went skiing. We arrived around 9 to a quickly-filling parking lot. Temps last night went down to around 40 so the snow firmed up.

Racers Edge

We started on Hellgate which was softening quickly in the sun with nice small bumps. We stripped down to t-shirts after the first run.

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Hunter Mountain, NY: 12/20/09

Got up at a ridiculous hour, made coffee, and hit the road at 5am. It was still snowing fairly hard and it looked like 14-15″ had fallen at our place. The county roads were a disaster, but once I got on to the state and interstate roads things were fine.

I met up with Jamesdeluxe at 6:45 at an A&P in Northern NJ, and got to Hunter at about 8:30. There was no traffic on I87 and the mountain was not nearly as busy as I imagined it would be on a weekend.

We’d planned on Hunter because, it had been COLD and we wanted to take advantage of Hunter’s well-known snowmaking capacity. It felt odd to be driving out of a big storm to ski a mountain with no new snow.

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