Simple Joys

This past Sunday morning, a friend and colleague made a keen observation that was simple, interesting and important. Despite having opened with two meters of new snow on the ground several weeks ago, Treble Cone hasn’t had any additional snow since. That is until this past Sunday. A decent size storm rolled in Sunday afternoon that is continuing to batter our resort with very cold air (by New Zealand standards), a lot of wind, and a lot of snow. Deep, dry snow. The snow started falling around mid-day so that by the time of our afternoon group lineup for the Snow Sports School, there was already several inches of fresh powder on the ground. With few guests around to take lessons, a snowball fight broke out among the instructors at lineup. It got serious, with the requisite chest thumping, trash talking, and trickery. Our young Kiwi snowboard instructor with serious cricket credentials proved no match for a youth spent playing dodgeball, baseball and softball on the playgrounds of America. It was a blast, everyone participated, and it was the kind of spontaneous, joyous play one usually associates with children.

My friend’s observation of this was that our staff played like children released from school for a snow day despite the fact that they are all experienced, highly trained snow sports professionals who play on snow for a living. Not one of us was grizzled enough, jaded enough, or grumpy enough to not find the arrival of snow an occasion worthy of unpretentious, unscripted, and uninhibited play. What makes our staff such great professionals is that they (and so many others in our resort) are able to transmit the joy found in fresh snow (and even in old snow) to our guests. It’s one of the most important things we do as instructors.

By the time Treble Cone opened Monday morning we had more than 20 centimeters in the base area. In an extremely rare set of circumstances, there were several centimeters on the ground along the lakeside in Wanaka and a lot of ice on the roads, making travel very difficult. This meant that the lift line, when our base-area six-seater opened this morning, was filled with instructors in uniform and only a few intrepid civilians. We were giggling, whooping and hollering, and generally having a ball, reveling in the joys of a great powder day. And then we went to work, which really just meant sharing all that joy with our guests. It’s a great job, and at Treble Cone it’s done by a remarkable collection of passionate and gifted professionals.