Skiing and Balance

I actually like work. But during the relatively short winter, I can’t focus on anything but skiing.

It’s no secret that I was really disappointed in my season last year. On my birthday (Jan 8th) I realized I was probably done for the season. I did actually get to the mountains one more time – for a 4-day weekend in late February. That weekend was like a religious experience for me. I skied primarily alone. I cherished every single turn. I read over the TRs from that weekend a hundred times over the summer.

I learned something. Don’t take anything for granted. On December 20, I had one of the great ski days of my life. At around 1:30, we’d had so many first tracks and we were beat that we called it a day. I knew more snow was coming the next day, so I went into town to pick up some supplies, relax and do a blog entry. I will NEVER do that again. Conditions like that – I’m going BELL-TO-BELL.

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Mad River Glen, VT: 12/22/09

After skiing 3 days in the brutally windy cold, riding gondolas and high speed lifts, skiing on man-made with no new natural snow, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to venture out another day in the negative wind chills, especially at an old school place like MRG with slow lifts and no snowmaking.

Mad River Glen

My dear old friend Jim, who lives in the MRV and is the GM of The Bridges Resort, a former snowboarder-turned-MRG-pinhead, who can ski any day, took the day off to ski with me at MRG, regardless of the cold and wind. He said it was going to be sunny and nice and the skiing will be good. I told him that if he was skiing, I was skiing, so out we went to the ski area that is just around the corner.

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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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