Paradise

The "backside" of the mountain here in Crested Butte is called the Paradise Bowl. The name "Paradise" belies a confidence, even an arrogance about the place despite there being quite a number of other, proper bowls which are further afield than Paradise and which have more demanding terrain. The fact is, however, that when conditions are just so and the snow falls deep and impossibly light, this very uncrowded place really reaches into that realm of otherworldly fantastic. Paradise. Today was such a day. It snowed all last night and all day today, and it's still dumping snow on us now. Tomorrow, the skiing likely will be even better, which frankly is hard to imagine. Paradise it is for these few days, and in our collective memory it always will be.

Taking the Show on the Road

It's currently Presidents Week, typically the busiest week of the season for the snow sports business. Most schools in the nation are on holiday for the week celebrating the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and a lot of people take that time to ski and ride with their families. Okemo is a busy place under normal circumstances and during Presidents Week it can be a bit nutty. Those of us who work there gear up for this week as though it were the Super Bowl, the World Series, the Olympics, and the World Cup all rolled into one. It may be nuts, but when we are prepared for it, we do our jobs well and our guests are in a great state of mind, it's a whole lot of fun.

Okemo and Vermont generally have had some very difficult weather conditions to contend with this week, so it's definitely been a test of everyone's mettle. Thankfully, our snowmaking and grooming continue to amaze everyone, guests and staff alike, and the resort has fared pretty well considering. At least that's what people have been telling me. I'm not there.

I'm in Colorado, working for a spell at Okemo's "little sister" resort, Crested Butte. Together with a couple of colleagues, I'm working with some guests that I normally ski with this week at Okemo. It was time for an adventure, and we're very glad to have had the opportunity to provide one for them here in the Rockies.

Crested Butte is quite a different place from Okemo in many, many ways. The mountain is big, steep, snowy, far from any metropolitan area, a true destination resort, and definitely culturally a part of the American West. But one thing has become crystal clear: after several years of ownership by the family that also owns Okemo and operates Sunapee, the guest service here has taken on a remarkably familiar tone and a thoroughness that we refer to as "the Okemo Difference". Our resorts do not hire guest service consultants, we do not subscribe to some pre-engineered method of training our people, we do not hard-sell our guests, we do not have a script that we follow, and we do not have a scientific prescription. What we do have is an ability to create an environment where guests and staff alike enjoy being in our resorts, where we genuinely are happy to share our places with those that travel to experience them, and where we are comfortable enough in our roles and our places that we can greet people and take care of them with informality, sincerity and attention to detail. It helps that we hire carefully and staff our resorts with some wonderful, hard-working and dedicated folks, and that's certainly been our impression here at Crested Butte.

It's wonderful to experience these similarities while on the road. Given my role here, I really am an "internal guest", as the expression goes. Everyone here on the 'normal' staff at Crested Butte has gone out of their way to make my colleagues and me feel at home and welcome. It's awesome to see and experience this consistency of tone from one place to another, and it certainly is making our stay here, and our guests experience here, a great one. It helps that we've had lots of fresh, dry, powder snow followed by deep, blue, cloudless skies and that the terrain here is absolutely fantastic. I'll be here for another week, and I intend to savor every last bit of it before heading back to the familiar confines in Vermont. It's just great to take our show on the road and see that it really is the best in the business.

Soul Survival

Every so often, skiers, ski writers and all manner of self-appointed nay-sayers complain about the loss of the soul of skiing. Here at Okemo they point to the snowmaking, the groomed trails, the slopeside condos, the wide runs and the many amenities as somehow an indication that skiing as a sport has lost its way. Obviously, they're wrong. We see a million examples every day that skiing's soul is alive and well. Particularly perturbed by this phenomenon last year, I wrote a piece for this blog about it called, aptly enough, "Shouting at the Wind".  (http://russendlesswinter.blogspot.com/2010/02/shouting-at-wind.html). More importantly and on a positive note, in today's New York Times sports section, there is an article about my favorite little slice of skiing's soul alive and in action.

My hometown in the very Northwestern corner of Connecticut is the tiny village of Salisbury, and it hosts the Eastern Ski Jumping Championships every year. Salisbury has hosted ski jumps since the 1930's, and the organization that runs the jumps (the Salisbury Winter Sports Association, "SWASA") also organizes a number of other great activities for the local folk. It's as grass roots and as unpretentious a group as you'll find in any sport, and it's pure distilled skiing soul. This year, after a remarkable fundraising effort to rebuild and modernize the Salisbury Ski Jumps at Satre Hill that had the support of the entire community, Salisbury is hosting the 2011 Ski Jumping and Nordic Combined Junior Olympics. It a tremendous complement for the dedicated volunteers at SWASA, a wonderful addition to the annual Jump Fest festivities, and it'll rekindle faith in the soul of skiing for even the most grizzled winter sports misanthropes.

It's an easy prescription: go to Salisbury, Connecticut for the weekend of February 11-13th; enjoy time outside in a convivial atmosphere watching elite athletes compete in an environment free of crass commercialism; warm yourself near the fire with a glass of something at one of the local inns or restaurants; attend the Snow Ball and let your hair down a bit; and the result will be joy, optimism, ruddy cheeks, and the satisfaction of time well spent in the company of good people. Isn't that the point?!

The New York Times article about the Salisbury ski jumps can be found here –
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/09/sports/skiing/09skijump.html?src=me&ref=sports

The SWASA website is the go-to source for information about the 2011 JO's, the rebuilding of the Satre Hill jumps, and ski jumping generally -http://www.jumpfest.org/

All Work and No Play

Today, February 2nd, was a powder day. Plain and simple. A sick, rad, sweet, rippin', epic, choking on it, take a sick day, play hooky, grin until your face hurts kind of powder day. Thankfully, just in case we didn't make the most of it because we were working too hard in the Okemo Ski + Ride School (note the radio harness on my chest in the photo), it's still snowing as I write and we'll have another powder day tomorrow. I try to stay away from shameless self-promotion here on my blog and to focus instead on interesting thoughts and experiences relating to my life and work in skiing. But, there are times in my life and work when the skiing and riding is so great that it reaches metaphysical status and we just need to rip some turns in the pow. And then we gloat by sharing photographic evidence.

Thanks go to my friend and colleague Chris Saylor for taking the time to take some photos. Believe me, when the skiing is this good, stopping to take photos is a big sacrifice!

Your faithful blogger inspecting the product on Ledges at Okemo.