my sometimes-skeptical social commentary

Archive for the ‘skiing’ Category

I’m hoping for a longer winter, because I’ve only had one chance to go skiing so far this season.

When I went to the ski shop on Saturday to return the boys’ season rentals, I discovered that ski country still had plenty of snow, and I whined to the ski shop owners that it would have been great to have one more day of skiing. Naturally their response was “come back tomorrow, you don’t have to turn in the skis today.” I called my wife to make sure nothing was planned for the next day, then packed the skis back into the car and gleefully drove home.

I also called a friend of mine who recently told me he was interested in skiing with us next season, and he agreed to meet us at our house at 8:30 a.m. the next morning.

The weather was perfect, and at first the snow was perfect, too. But then the temperature went up, and the snow started getting mushy. I think the reason my friend had a bad fall is that he hit some slow snow on a turn and couldn’t get his balance back. He did something to his knee and will be on crutches for a few weeks.

But my friend is still enthusiastic about skiing and insisted that me and boys keep skiing while he rested in the lodge–he hoped to rest a bit and join us after a while, but his knee was in bad shape.

The boys and I kept skiing and occasionally stopped into the lodge to check on my friend throughout the afternoon. It got warmer and warmer, and we started getting uncomfortably warm, so while we rode up the chairlift, we unzipped our coats a little and took our gloves off. Once, I was holding my youngest’s gloves for him, and when we got off the chairlift, I thought I had given him both gloves, but I had lost one of them.

We skied down the slope, trying to follow the chairlift so that we could find the glove on the ground, but part of that slope was closed due to poor conditions, so we didn’t find the glove on the ground.

When we got in line to get back on the chairlift, I was looking around to see if someone had turned it in for us, and there were a couple gloves, but not the one I lost. After we got on the chair, however, we discovered his glove ON THE CHAIR. So it turns out, that of the 119 chairs on that lift, we happened to ski down the hill and wait in line with just the right timing to get on the same chair. What are the chances? Is it 1 out of 119? Or do you have to decrease the odds because of the number of people in line ahead of us?

Those are our two stories of luck; one of us had good luck, one bad luck.

This might be our last day of skiing for the season, but we’re hoping to get one more day in over Easter weekend. In this picture, you see the boys riding up a chairlift without me–I was in the chair behind them with their cousin. This photo was taken with their mother in mind–she doesn’t worry about them when they’re with me at all!

This is a great trail, but we didn’t get to use it much this season because there were so many weekends when the rain washed away the snow on the southern-most slopes. But today! A LOT of snow made for a great day of skiing.

UPDATE: My knee hurts today. The thing about agreeing to follow your 7-year-old down “all the black diamond trails” and going off-trail through all the woods trails is that you can get hurt when you’re my age. As I was telling Dan this morning, the 60-pound kid has a lot easier time steering and stopping than someone who has as well developed a muscular system as I have (okay, that’s not the phrase I used when I was talking to Dan–but I’m not telling YOU my real weight). My knee isn’t swollen, just a bit achey, so I’m almost limping when I walk. Mainly I’m trying to avoid putting any rotational stress on it, because that’s what probably caused this ache-injury.

In addition to the achey knee, just about every major muscle on my body aches today. That is not really a problem to complain about, it just goes to tell you how physical our day was. Because it was just me and my oldest, we skiied fast and hard and hit every black diamond we could hit. We even skied moguls, which was a first for both of us. It’s a good kind of ache, if you know what I mean.

I guess now would be a good time to take some ibuprofen.

Have you noticed that all the skiing pictures I post are taken from the chairlift?

Today was the first time my youngest went up the chairlift and skied down the “big hill” with us, and man was it nerve-wracking. He’s pretty small, so if someone hits him, he’s going to get hurt. And because he’s new to skiing, his steer/stop skills aren’t what they should be.

There was one terrifying moment for me when he went flying straight down a blue square trail, faster than I would feel safe. I like to take wide turns to keep my speed down, so that is what I was trying to get him to do, but he couldn’t hear me shouting to him and just kept going. Fortunately he didn’t fall or run into anybody or get run over by anybody. No fear. At least, not for him. I was scared senseless.