I agree with Scotty this is a great thread. I wish I had a story as interesting as these, but it's not even close.
In 1988, I was 30, I had a girlfriend who begged me to go cross country skiing with her. I resisted for a while but eventually I tried it. She took me to Garnet Hill Lodge, near Gore. We had no idea that you should check conditions or snowfall or whatever, we just went.
That first day it was icy as hell. If you've been to GHL you know that there is a short and pretty steep run from the lodge down to the ski shop with a 90 degree turn in it called the Cut Off. I straightlined and crashed in the corner pretty hard. I thought, this is going to be fun. Overnight it snowed and conditions got great, we did have quite a lot of fun. That trail network seemed so huge to me. We would go back a few times each year.
Eventually we started looking at the trail map and wondering about the "dotted lines" that went off the edge of the map into the Siamese Ponds Wilderness. We started "skiing in the woods" and there was no turning back. If the woods were in, we had little interest in the groomed trails. We'd still stay at Garnet Hill, be first in the dining room for breakfast and stay out all day, often returning after dark.
We started orienteering, looking at the map picking out random spots that looked interesting and finding our way with a compass. We became friends with an adventurous guy, Rand, who was a waiter at the lodge and incredibly good at matching a contour map to what we were seeing in the woods. We always laughed about orienteering books that would say "find a distant landmark that is recognizable" to figure out where you were. If you could recognize a distant peak, who needs a compass? We came to know the northern end of the Siamese very well. We started winter camping on skis too.
In 1997 had planned a two night overnight with Rand. At the last minute he changed his mind. I had my heart set on it and I went alone, deep into the woods in a blizzard. 30 inches of snow feall and it was the experience of a lifetime, I'll never forget it:
I didn't plan to go solo.
nyskiblog.com
We loved skiing so much, and started to pray for snow in November. Sometimes there was none. Rand convinced me one year to come to Gore and ski. My first day of lift -served skiing, I was 40 year old, on 210s with leather boots, my backcountry touring setup.
I'd ski Gore 4 or 5 times a year, I was mostly on Sunway or at times Showcase. Some years Gore would open Showcase first because it was shorter and required less snowmaking. We started doing tele turns too. I bought some Merrill Super Comps (half leather, half plastic) and some "fat" (haha) skis. One March day it dumped huge and Lori Phoebe, a rafting guide, took me "to the top" for the first time on the
Old Red Gondola. She took me into the trees and it changed my life. All I wanted to do was ski the trees.
I wanted to be in the Adirondacks and started to dream about living there. In 1997 I bought five acres near Garnet Hill. I was now dating my wife who loved to look at real estate for entertainment.
I started buying a Gore pass. My sister lived in Europe and her family were all skiers. My nieces were rippers. I went to Switzerland two years in a row to ski with them and they OWNED me. The second year I decided to upgrade to full plastic boots hoping to keep up better.
At one point, I can' t remember when, our company had a client, who really liked me — he was marketing director of the Resort at Squaw Creek in Tahoe. Two years in a row I stayed for a week, living the high life with the uber rich. Unfortunately that guy was a jerk, not to me, but to women, and he got fired for being a total pig. It was not ideal, because he was giving me this incredible free trip (I saw my bill for the first one it was over $8000) and I kind of had to go along with his misogynistic crap when we were together.
I also did some hut-to-hut skiing in Summit County Colorado, two years in a row after that. That was incredible. It was expensive, but not when you considered WHAT you were getting. The guides were amazing. One day we had to ski five miles downhill on a snowmobile trail that was all swailed out. It was exhausting but my guide taught me how to ski bumps.
In 2001 we
built the cabin on that land, off the grid. Rand actually built it, cutting the timbers with a chainsaw and handsaw, since we had no electric.
I proposed to Zelda and she said no. I was pretty bummed. The whole mountain dream seemed pointless without her. We split up, but stayed in touch. One time we were talking on the phone and she brought up the idea of getting married again, and I kind of told her I was done with proposing. She started to propose on the phone and I shut that down. A guy needs to be romanced and I wanted a proper proposal. ?
Zelda and I got married the next year and had our honeymoon at the cabin.
In 2006 we had our daughter, so we refinanced our house to dig a well, install a septic and electricity. Deep down I felt that without utilities we'd probably ski a lot less. I tried to set it up so that eventually, if things went well, we could build a house on that spot.
In 2007 I googled "best powder in the East" and learned about Jay Peak. Somehow the internet rabbit hole led me to "First Tracks" aka FTO and I started posting there. In the summer I'd love to go back and look at my posts and pics to relive the winter. I decided to start this blog a few years later. It was really just a place to keep my pics and save all my weather links. To some extent this site was built for a flatlander to understand the forecast and make the decision about whether or not to make the long drive to the mountains. I posted almost exclusively about skiing Gore, and through the magic of google, I started getting COMMENTS. WOAH. Other Gore skiers started following NYSB. I was not expecting that.
In 2010
@jamesdeluxe convinced me to start skiing the Catskills on day trips. My life was changed the first time I skied Plattekill after a huge dump:
If you think Belleayre is in the middle of nowhere... Plattekill is 20 miles beyond that.
nyskiblog.com
I loved writing about skiing and connecting with other skiers who could relate to my experience. I still LIVE for blog comments, especially when someone says something that indicates that what I have written clearly articulates how they feel about the same thing.
SkiAdk kind of became my online home, but eventually it was abandoned by the moderators. I was kind of a quasi-moderator, and a character named Snowballs convinced me to start a forum here. It was summer of 2010 and I googled "free forum software for a blog" and found Nabble. If I had known the forum would actually take off, I would have paid money for a decent product, but hey hindsight.
The tail started to wag the dog. I started to ski other places and recruit other writers so the blog would be more interesting. I soon learned that I cared way more about snow than vert, and really didn't like big crowds.
In 2011 a bunch of us, NYSB,
@riverc0il from snowway.com, Mad Pat,
@MC2 @Sick Bird Rider all guys with blogs convinced Steve Wright to put us up for a few days at Jay Peak for the first annual Northeast Ski Bloggers summit. It snowed the first day and I had NEVER seen trees like that. So widely spaced and snow so deep.
Over the years my gear got burlier. Rocker changed my life too. It's only been recently that I am starting to really get out of the back seat and lean forward, skiing down the fall line.
I know it's nuts but I really don't have a lot of desire to ski out west or in Europe. I want to ski every ski area in NY, my favorites in Vermont (Magic, Killington, Sugarbush, Smuggs, Jay) and some others I haven't skied like Bolton and Middlebury. I also want to ski Mount Bohemia.
Really hoping to build that house in 2024, working on it now.
Wow that was longer than I thought, and I glossed over a lot of things. I guess I would finish by saying thanks to all who share the stoke here, it means a lot to me.
snowbrains.com
