What Kind of Ski Snob Are You?

If you think about it, we are all ski snobs of one sort or another. Some are terrain snobs and care about nothing else but lapping the steepest, gnarliest, longest, and most consistently-pitched lines they can find.

Hickory Ski Center

Others are snow snobs who don’t bother leaving the house unless there’s a decent amount of powder waiting for them; and if the lift-served ski areas don’t have it, they’ll go off-the-map for their fix. Of course, for most people, the best situation is getting both powder and great terrain at the same time, but hey, this is the northeast and we have to deal with whatever’s on the menu for a given day and not whine about it.

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Harvey’s Ski Season Highlights 2010-2011

The 2010-2011 ski season started off slowly, without a lot of natural snow. In our corner of New York — the southern Adirondacks — we only had ten inches of snow by New Years Day.

opening the 2010 ski season at Gore
Opening Day at Gore Mountain

But sustained cold through the entire season ensured that what we got stuck around, and NY ski mountains made steady progress covering trails with manmade snow.

My season included a nice lists of firsts. I skied the opening days at Gore, Hunter and Plattekill. And my day at Hunter was the debut of New York’s first six pack chairlift, the Kaatskill Flyer.

first tracks at Plattekill
First Tracks of the Season off Plattekill’s Lift 2

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Skiing, Movement, Photography and Video

I continue to think about the challenge of digitally capturing ski days. Powerful, imaginative images can be a source of joy forever. But I don’t want shooting to diminish the ski experience for myself or others.

There’s something I like about this sequence of images. They’re sharp enough, the conditions were decent, and Rochester Mark is a great skier.

But there’s more to it than that. The series was taken with a continuous shooting feature. If you (click to) enlarge the panel above and glance from image to image, you can almost imagine Mark in action. When I run quickly through those photos in a digital album, it’s very evocative of skiing. In a rudimentary way, it simulates movement.

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