Training, Training the Trainers, and Training the Trainers' Trainers

Just one of the views from Sugarbush on December 10, 2012

In the corner of the universe inhabited by ski and snowboard instructors, training is a central focus. Ongoing, topical training serves several concurrent purposes: it is the principal way in which our snowsports schools exercise quality control; training fosters a work environment (and a workforce) that is healthy and supportive of personal growth; it assists all of us in making sure that we are continuing to evolve as skiers, riders, thinkers and teachers; and all of the foregoing really helps us stay in a mindset that allows us to provide exceptional experiences for our guests as their teachers.

With Sugarbush opening on time this season, we were able to conduct a ‘Train the Trainers Day’ on snow for the first time in a while. Those of us on the training staff were able to ski together for the day, walk through the clinics we required for all instructors on our staff, and generally make sure we’re all on the same page for our season-long training program. The day was a blast, and it gave me confidence that I’ll be able to effectuate a positive change in our organizational culture and in the quality of the product we deliver on the hill.

Training can be a large expense for snowsports schools and those of us in management occasionally have to make the case that including more training in our budgets is money well-spent. Those times are an important gut check for us, putting us in a position to make a business-focused argument for why training is so important. It’s a similar argument made by environmentalists arguing that being green is good for business – it’s an upfront cost that generates better quality, a better experience, and more business as a consequence. Those snowsports schools with large and well-managed training programs and staffs that have an expectation that ongoing training is a normal and desirable part of their everyday existence as pros tend to be the most successful in the business. It’s not a coincidence.

One of the issues I’ve faced over the past eight years since achieving my ‘full cert’ – my PSIA Level III, the highest certification available in the USA – is that I’ve received precious little training. I’ve conducted an awful lot of training clinics for instructors, both at the resorts where I work and elsewhere, but I’ve been battling my constant fear that I’ll plateau as a skier and as a ski teacher. It’s left me to have to occasionally seek out training, sometimes far from home and at significant expense. It’s always worthwhile, but the fact is that those days where I can focus on my own continuing development are too few and far between. That is, until next week.

I’ve been invited to participate in an extraordinary block of training. A few of us, very few, who are at approximately the same level within PSIA and in the industry here in the Eastern USA have the opportunity to spend several days next week training with the PSIA National Alpine Team Coach, Rob Sogard. The PSIA National Alpine Team (like its snowboard, nordic and adaptive siblings) is more than simply the national team of ski instructors. The team is responsible for the continuing development of the American Teaching System, for developing national programs and standards, and for generally setting the tone and agenda for snowsports teaching in America. There’s a lot of very effective trickle down between the national team members and local, entry-level instructors, and the various rungs on the PSIA ladder and each resort’s training staff are the principal vehicles for this. What this means for me is that next week I’ll get a significant chunk of time to hone my skiing, my understanding of skiing, my teaching, and my awareness of where skiing is headed from the very best in the business.

I have significant anxiety about taking the time away from work next week, but my expectation is that I’ll be able to bring my experience home to Sugarbush and share it in a meaningful way with our staff. Ultimately, the goal is to transfer all that I learn through to our guests, though I definitely won’t be explaining to our guests about my time spent with the trainers’ trainers’ trainer. So, it’s back to school for me even if only for a few days, and I just can’t wait!

The Coach

Lincoln Peak at Sugarbush on November 6, 2012

I made my first turns of the season this morning. It’s November 10th. Let’s pause and let that sink in for a moment. November 10th. With Sugarbush Resort’s planned opening not until next Saturday, this morning I stepped out of the door of my home in Ludlow and skied my old hill, Okemo, which opened for the season this past week. No, it has no bearing on how the rest of the season will go. No, it is not an indication of anything other than a particularly cold few weeks in November. No, the conditions were not particularly good and there wasn’t a lot of terrain open. But yes, it is November 10th. Amazing.

Some of the sights and sounds of the ski season are less poetic in the telling than others. We can wax on about the wind rushing past, the sensations of our skis, of gravity drawing us down the mountain, of our joints and muscles going through the tried and true movements of skiing, simultaneously getting the blood flowing and putting our minds and spirits at ease. And yet, these weren’t the things that made the day so familiar, such a joyful indicator that ski season has finally arrived after a long two months off of snow since my return from New Zealand (yes, I know, poor me).

Having changed resorts, changed roles, and changed perspectives, parts of the day definitely felt a bit odd. I parked in a public lot instead of where I have among the other staff vehicles for the past decade. I walked into the base lodge to change, carrying my equipment with me rather than merely walking empty-handed into the locker room. I spent the morning by myself, doing top-to-bottom runs on the only top-to-bottom run that was entirely open, trying to find my rhythm in the increasingly choppy man-made snow that formed a narrow corridor on World Cup. After two hours, in need of a short break and some perspective, I went inside the summit lodge, unbuckled my boots and removed my gloves and helmet in the same way that I have in that lodge a million times as though on autopilot. And then, like Pavlov’s dog, I headed for the cafeteria and without thinking about what I was doing, I grabbed a cup from the stack and filled it half from the hot chocolate dispenser and half from the coffee urn. The moment when I realized that I had been merely going through the motions without conscious thought occurred when the cashier asked me for my pass and I realized that I no longer received my employee discount at Okemo and would have to pay full retail. I guess there’s nothing like full retail to snap anyone out of a stupor.

Our olfactory memory is more acute than that of our other senses, no less so with my go-to hot drink on a ski day. The drink is most definitely not a mochachino – it is far more of a workingman’s choice than espresso and hoity-toity chocolate. I’ve always known it to be called “the coach”, though I don't know where that comes from, and it’s sort of the ski pro’s version of an Arnold Palmer. It consists of mass-produced coffee from a huge cafeteria urn with a spigot on the bottom and hot chocolate from a major manufacturer consisting of powdered mix and hot water whirled together in a big, automated dispenser. And its distinctive taste, the sum being something far greater than the whole of its mediocre parts, is definitely something that is inseparable from and evocative of my life on skis. And I love it, for the taste, for the sensation of drinking something warm and sweet on a cold day, and for what it represents.

Skiing is both my passion and my vocation. While that sometimes means striking a difficult balance and making tough sacrifices, I love it and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. As a consequence, when I’m not in ski season I can occasionally feel a bit lost, particularly if I’ve been working so hard on ski-related things without any actual skiing, as has been the case this fall. And today, with the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of the season returning in full, something deep inside of me relaxed, basking in the warmth of all that is familiar and comfortable in the knowledge that ski season is here. Finally.

The Ivory Tower

Yet another gorgeous fall day at the Lincoln Peak base area of Sugarbush

When I arrived at university as a Freshman all those years ago, I took the advice of a close friend of my father’s and signed up to take Economics 101 with a member of the faculty that had been his own professor thirty years prior. Yes, that meant that this professor had been there a long time and was perhaps lacking some modernity in his approach, but I was grateful for the suggestion and the course got me hooked. Four years later, I received my Bachelor’s degree in Economics. The professor (who shall remain nameless) definitely took an ivory tower approach to the teaching of Economics – the course was very heavy on theory, light on ‘modeling’, and totally devoid of finance. The Economics Department, as he took great pains to tell us, was the first organized department at this old, originally Episcopalian, traditionally liberal arts college, so the faculty knew it as the “Mother Discipline”. By mid-semester, one of my classmates asked the Prof why all of the other Econ 101 sections were spending so much time doing hard math, financial modeling and practical, real-world stuff while we were using out-of-print texts and working so hard on theory. Prof’s response, matching his demeanor, lockjaw, appearance and general world view, word for word, was “Here in the Mother Discipline, we hope that when you graduate from Trinity College, someone else will be doing that work for you.” All of us in the class had the same response – ‘I’m with that guy!’ Needless to say, it was a fanciful attitude as antiquated as believing that World War I was won on the playing fields of Eton, but it did inspire us to reach higher. Needless to say, that was a looooooong time ago, and at the time I didn’t exactly have my sights set on a career in the ski industry.

Fast forward to 2012, and I’m busy getting the Sugarbush Ski & Ride School ready for another winter here in Warren, Vermont in my first year as the Director. Virtually all snow sports schools go through the same process, and the nature of our business means that they definitely don’t fit neatly into any conventional business model we would have learned in Prof’s class. When the snow melts in Spring and the lifts stop turning, we lay everyone off only to rehire them in October. At Sugarbush, we have about 300 instructors, a bunch of supervisors, and several sales staff that report to me – all must do their intake paperwork before we can put them to work, and we need to process all of it and input them all in our HR, sales and scheduling systems. We accomplished the majority of this over the last two weeks, with me mostly watching and listening to my more experienced staff. And there’s more: ski and snowboard teaching requires a lot of knowledge, skill and training to do well, but with an amount of attrition typical in the industry this means that in the fall we hire a number of first-time instructors that we have to teach the ins and outs of what we do, introduce them to our systems, ethos, facilities, policies and programs, and then make sure we equip them to succeed as instructors. Yikes. And then we need to conduct on-snow training for all of the instructors to get them back into the groove, to enhance their abilities to teach, and to make sure our end-product is at the level of quality that we demand for our guests. This business model definitely was not covered in the pages of my dog-eared, well-worn, and long-out-of-print economics text books. Getting all of this done, keeping the staff focused on the big picture of why we’re here, keeping our passion for skiing and riding front and center, and getting ready to provide an exceptional guest experience for all ages and abilities of skiers and snowboarders so that we open in a month with all pistons firing, will be deserving of some satisfaction. Keep it up every day for a six month season outside in all kinds of weather on the slopes of a big, steep and gnarly mountain, and we’ll have accomplished a great deal. And that’s all simply the baseline expectation of our business. Don’t mistake my tone for concern or a lack of confidence – I have a terrific staff, some very capable supervisors, a kick-butt business manager and it’ll all happen in good time and in good form for our season to begin. If we do it well, we'll all get to enjoy skiing and riding a ton and will get tremendous satisfaction from making it happen for our guests.

The first time I went to New Zealand for the Southern Winter, planning what to bring and how to pack required some guess-work and a lot of reliance on what other people had told me. After six seasons down there, that guess-work is gone along with my anxiety about it, and I can pack for the summer with ease, not breaking a sweat as I account for all of the possibilities that affect what I need, what I’ll want to have with me, and what room there will be for things that make my time away more comfortable. My pre-season work-load at Sugarbush is somewhat similar, and my expectation is that in the years to come it’ll be far easier to keep all of the details in perspective so that I can stay in my more comfortable big picture view without worrying about dropping any balls.

As has always been the case with pre-season planning in all of the roles I’ve played in skiing, I am looking forward to the day when I get down to the business of the day-to-day operation of a ski and snowboard school. With a little help from Mother Nature, that day will be one month from now and when we open I may just have to make a bunch of turns for myself just to put all of it in perspective. I’ll be packed and ready, so to speak. In the interim, I’ll do my best to stay out of the ivory tower, to stay abreast of the details, and not to take for granted the people who will have done so much of the work for me.

The Next Valley Over

This is a small slice of the view from the Lincoln Peak base area at Sugarbush.

When I’m in New Zealand during the summer / winter / whatever it is, I often encounter people who have no sense of Vermont – where we are, who we are, what it’s like culturally, topographically, economically, and so forth. In order to describe where I live and work, I usually explain that the whole place is covered by mountains, that the mountains run in ridges that are typically on a North-South axis, that at the foot of every mountain is a river on the valley bottom, that next to every river is a road, and that every town is sited at the bend in one of those rivers. Last year, it helped put the devastation of tropical storm Irene in context – the storm’s destruction made the news in New Zealand for days on end. At the moment, for me personally and professionally, this way of looking at Vermont puts my recent change of job, change of resort, and change of location in context.

Okemo is in Ludlow, which sits at a bend in the Black River as it turns to the East and makes its way towards the Connecticut River. The Connecticut is a major waterway that forms the border between Vermont and New Hampshire, travels through Massachusetts and eventually spills out into Long Island Sound at between the towns of Saybrook and Lyme, Connecticut. In the Black River Valley, the mountains are older and a little lower, so the valleys are a bit wider and shallower, and the rivers are a bit gentler, more placid. Sugarbush, where I am now the Director of the Ski & Ride School, is quite a bit further North and sits in the Mad River Valley with the towns of Warren and Waitsfield at its base. The section of mountains where Sugarbush is located is known as the “Spine of the Greens” and contains some of the highest mountains in the state – highest, steepest, and craggiest. For perspective, Mount Ellen, one of the two lift-serviced peaks in the resort, includes the longest ski lift and longest vertical drop in the state. The river is called the Mad River because, unlike every other waterway in the state, it flows from South to North, going up the valley and then around to the West before spilling into Lake Champlain. Because the peaks are so tall and steep, the valley floor is quite narrow and the towns are densely settled, with all development in Warren and Waitsfield perched directly on the banks of the river. Both towns were hit incredibly hard by Irene even by Vermont standards and, like all of our towns including Ludlow, Warren and Waitsfield have bounced back amazingly well in typical Yankee fashion.

What all of this means for me at the moment is that I haven’t simply switched resorts and communities, I have switched valleys. The Mad River Valley, as I’ve found over the past week, looms large in the minds and hearts of the people who live there. Someone is either from The Valley or not, has worked in The Valley before or not, and understands the particular sensibilities of the folks in The Valley or not. Though it is striking in its use in the lexicon of the area and the resort, it’s particularly interesting in what it tells us about the people who live and make their livelihood in The Valley. People in The Valley are very prideful of their small place in the world and proud to be deep in the heart of Vermont, both literally and figuratively - it is strikingly beautiful and definitely draws people who are particularly devoted to their passions, skiing and riding at Sugarbush among them. I don’t mean prideful in a chest-thumping sort of way, rather it gives them a sense of being in a place that’s a little different, a little bit separated, and definitely reliant on themselves as a community to sink or swim together. I am not from The Valley, I haven’t had a lot of exposure to The Valley, and as an outsider coming in, it’s important that I respect what makes the place so great and so different.

My sense of things is that the ski industry in America is at the end of an era where the watering down of skiing and riding and the resorts where we pursue them was the norm, and at the start of one where adventure is coming back into it’s rightful place in our lives. At Sugarbush and in The Valley, the response to this idea is “Duh, where have you been?!” Well, I’ve been in a very different valley, not better or worse but different, and I’m now very excited to be in The Valley. Every morning when I arrive at work and I look up from the Mad River to the tops of Lincoln Peak and Mount Ellen, I’m aware that I’ve arrived somewhere special. T.S. Elliot said in 'Little Gidding' “The end is where we start from”, and that’s true of moving from one valley to the next and from one resort to another. My time at Okemo and the Black River Valley has ended and my time at Sugarbush and the Mad River Valley has started. And I just can’t wait to ski here!

Signing Off from Wanaka

As often as I travel, some things never fail to amaze me. This morning, Monday, I woke in Wanaka, New Zealand where I am now sitting amidst packed bags. At the end of my day, a very long day, I'll be in the high desert of Arizona for a few days of contemplation before heading home to Vermont. Despite the lack of snow here in New Zealand (until today, apparently), I've had a terrific season of teaching at Cardrona, benefiting from their exceptionally professional staff and their incredibly welcoming atmosphere. They really made me feel at home, something for which I'm very grateful. I've enjoyed being a ski teacher this season as much as I have in a very long time. Still, new adventures await me at Sugarbush Resort in Vermont - I'm definitely excited, I have a lot to learn and there's a lot to do. In the meantime, I'll take one last look at the always jaw-dropping Southern Alps before getting my flip-flops some much-needed outdoor exercise on my way home. So, that's me done, signing off from Wanaka after another winter. Until next time ...

Come On, Spring, Hurry Up!

Just my typical day off stroll to town along Lake Wanaka. Ho-hum.

The ebb and flow of my days here in Wanaka as a ski instructor at Cardrona differs in ways big and small from home in Vermont. Principal among those is how we get to work and the logistics involved. Staff vans pick up everyone at selected locations in town, swing by the town office in Wanaka for a head count, and then we make the forty minute drive to Cardrona - twenty minutes from town to the bottom of the crazy, windy, mountainous, unpaved access road and another twenty minutes from there to the resort. All in, from the time I walk out of my house in the morning at 7:00AM it takes about an hour. The folks here find it amazing that at home in Ludlow, I could roll out of my house and be at my old job at Okemo in five or ten minutes, with the largest chunk of that time spent waiting for my engine block to heat up on cold winter days.

One upside of the logistics of getting to work here is that I do get a few minutes of downtime each morning, looking out at Lake Wanaka and the Southern Alps and observing the change in seasons. Wanaka is far enough south that at this time of year we see daily reminders that spring is on its way. Some of the signs are funny. Are the street lamps still on when we are leaving town? Are they still on when we're at the pickup spot? Do we need sunglasses when we get to work? On the road? In town?! Over the past week, there has been a significant increase in the noise from the birds in the trees around our house in the morning, in the amount of traffic on the roads, and in the number of people exercising off their winter insulation as I leave my house. In late August and September here on the South Island, we add something like three minutes of daylight every day, and we feel it! Like Spring everywhere, all of the changes come with a great sense of relief and release. Winter may 'set in' but 'spring has sprung', for crying out loud.

I head home from New Zealand next week to start my new role as the director of the Sugarbush Ski & Ride School. I'm very much looking forward to my first September in New England in a long time and I'm anxious to get cracking. In the meantime, I'll make use of all of the spring and all of the daylight I can get.

Lessons Well-Learned

A piste marker at Cardrona, essential
when air and snow are the same color

One of the indications of a great lesson, about skiing and riding or otherwise, is that it resonates with the student not only on the day and at the time, but also for weeks and even years afterwards. I am fortunate to have been the recipient of many great lessons as a skier and a ski pro, taught to me by some truly remarkable people. Some of those lessons are about technical skiing and teaching, some are about the business of snow sports, and many of them continue to inform me on a broader level, at a higher altitude.

After finishing my undergraduate degree more than twenty years ago, I moved to Colorado with some close friends and began my journey. In the years since, as a skier, coach, teacher, and trainer, I have been very fortunate to work and become friends with many pros and guests from around the world and from among several generations. Each contributes in some way to my understanding of skiing and ski teaching and to the joys I find in them. At times, whether I’m making wedge turns on the beginner hill, simplifying the world for nervous intermediates, giggling with great kids as we rip around, training instructors, and coordinating programs, certain lessons percolate to the surface. I work hard to take them to heart and to continue to learn from them.

Marty Harrison, Dan Bergeron and the many staff, guests and friends in Ludlow and at Okemo with whom I have shared so much over the past eleven seasons have helped me hone my own concepts of skiing, ski teaching, ski philosophy, line-up joke telling, edge bevels, the restorative effects of good Italian cooking, the psychological benefits of smoked salmon, why kids rule and why teaching them is a privilege, and how to find great satisfaction in eking out a living in such a beautiful place. I am grateful to and for all of them. Period.

Why the contemplative and rearward-looking histrionics while a big winter storm hammers the Southern Alps here in Wanaka? I’ve just accepted a big challenge, a major shift in my role in the industry, and I’ll need to take all of those well-learned lessons and put them into practice daily. I have accepted the position of Director of the Sugarbush Ski & Ride School in Warren, Vermont. I am excited and I have a lot to learn, but I am confident that I am ready, that Sugarbush represents a terrific opportunity for me, and that I can help lead the school there into an increasingly successful future. So, as I look ahead, please forgive me as I also take a few moments to look back and consider where I’ve been. Soon enough, I’ll be in Vermont charging forward.

In the meantime, it’s dumping at Cardrona right now and I’ll be in civies on my day off tomorrow enjoying all of it. If I’ve learned anything in my life as a ski pro, it’s that we have to take the time to enjoy our life as simple skiers when the opportunities present themselves. This coming winter in Vermont, I’ll look forward to doing that and more at Sugarbush!

After writing the foregoing, I did in fact have a great day of skiing except for the fact that we couldn't see past our noses. Can't have it all, I guess, but tomorrow ...


Yours truly dropping in

Darkest Before The Dawn

The view from Bremner Bay in Wanaka this morning

It’s dark out there. Very windy, very ominous, and very dark. Visibility up in the mountains is quite poor, there was icing on the lifts this morning and the wind is howling. Here in town it’s warm as I roam around on a day off, and one would think that looking upwards and seeing the storm slamming the mountains of the Mount Aspiring National Park while it’s so warm would not be a good thing - at home in Vermont that certainly would be the case. Here, like so many other details of the weather, precisely the opposite is true. With the tree line at an elevation barely above town and the skiable terrain all on the top half of the mountains, warm weather in town doesn’t necessarily mean the dreaded “r” word up on the hill – quite the opposite. It can be downright tropical at the lakeside while the driest, fluffiest, dreamiest snow this side of Hokkaido falls on our resorts. Of course, that hasn't happened in a while.

The resorts here in Wanaka have done a good job keeping conditions reasonably good for our guests, particularly so at Cardrona where I work, but we’ve all waited for the current storm with more than a bit of anxiety. So, as I look up the hill and understand that today may be only for the most intrepid skiers and riders, I have been a bit giddy with anticipation for the snow that is falling. Cardies' operations crew may have been doing an amazing job, but I’d love for them to get a break while I rip around and enjoy some fresh powder in the off-piste terrain that has been unskiable for a couple of weeks. Fingers crossed, tomorrow will be the day. It’s always darkest before the dawn, as the expression goes, and maybe it’s always ominous before the pow. My fat skis await me in the locker room and I expect to let them loose in the morning. Gratefully.

Seeing The Light

Sunrise view from Cardrona Alpine Resort

Here in Wanaka, we’re nearing the end of the busiest two weeks of the season. During the “school holidays”, all New Zealand and Australian schools are out and families often travel for their vacations. At home in the US, ski resorts depend on the December holidays, the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. birthday long weekend in mid-January, and Presidents Week in February for an enormous portion of our annual business, particularly in the Northeast. The school holidays here in NZ affect our season in similar fashion, except that it all happens in a single two week period and that those two weeks happen to be the second and third weeks of the season. As evidenced by my complete inability to post anything on this blog since I arrived in NZ almost a month ago, the importance of these first few weeks puts a lot of pressure on the resorts here and, especially with the often spotty snow at this time of year, it can be a bit stressful. This year has been no exception but now, at the end of the second week, we can see the light.

For the 2012 season here in Wanaka, I’ve switched resorts. After five seasons at Treble Cone including the past four as a program coordinator, supervisor, staff psychologist, spreadsheet guru, mass-scale-guest-service-maven and ‘any-problem-that-comes-down-the-pike-go-to-guy’, I am exceptionally happy to have moved to the other side of town and to be simply teaching skiing at Cardrona Alpine Resort. While Treble Cone is justly renown for being a ‘skiers mountain’, Cardrona is a much busier, very smoothly run family resort and it’s a great place to be a ski teacher. The instructors are quietly a remarkably impressive group - no chest beating here, no bravado, just good dedicated professional teachers from all over the world. All of the staff at Cardies have been incredibly welcoming to me and  have gone out of their way to make me feel at home and appreciated, for which I am very grateful. One of the interesting sidelines for me this year is that it’s the first fresh start I’ve had as an instructor in a very long time, and the truth is that it’s refreshing to simply start from scratch. The best part is that I’ve been able to do this while still living in Wanaka, maintaining the many friendships that have become so meaningful to me and making new ones at my new home mountain. With a less stressful (and marginally more lucrative) working life, I’m able to focus more on my skiing and my teaching, finding joy in the reasons I got into this business in the first place.

The holidays will officially end this weekend, and for now that’s a good thing. I’m pooped. Seriously tired. I’ve been getting a ton of work with a diverse group of great guests and I’ve been able to bring a lot of energy to the job, but I’m definitely ready for some rest. It’s not so much ‘the light at the end of the tunnel’, because the busy period is such a great time to be at the resort. It’s more that the end of the holidays will bring an opportunity to get some rest and shine the light of day on how we’ve done, and then to return to our mountain next week with renewed energy and enthusiasm. In the meantime, I’m going to try to levitate across my living room and get into bed early without having to expend much energy - I’ll need all of it for work tomorrow.

Talking About Cars, From New England to The World

Town hall in Grafton, Vermont in March

In the nineteenth century, Yankee clipper ships were instrumental in the growth of the United States as an industrial power. The sailors from ports from Connecticut to Maine raced around the world’s oceans bringing American raw materials and industrial products to Europe and Asia, making friends, opening markets, spreading the gospel of democracy and capitalism and, occasionally, empire building. No, this is not a post about the state of America’s relationship with the world, our economy, or our current political situation. It’s about radio. One radio show in particular.

I giggle a bit when I imagine the reaction some of the Yankee sailors would have encountered when they arrived on the far side of the world and the locals first heard their accents. [N.b. For folks here in America, a “Yankee” is someone from New England, meaning the states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine with the notable exception of baseball players. Yes, it’s ironic that the baseball Yankees are from New York and are reviled in New England, but that’s another story altogether.] Consider, if you will, the iconic ‘paaahk yaw caaaah in Haaavaahd Yaaad’ (read: park your car in Harvard Yard) accented Bostonian arriving in nineteenth century Japan (for reference, think of the accents in the film Good Will Hunting). Granted, this year the same person would be able to have a very interesting conversation with any Japanese baseball fan about the pros and cons of Bobby Valentine as a baseball manager, but I digress. Along with the accent, these intrepid Yankees brought with them a freshness, unencumbered by hierarchical class society and its stultifying self-consciousness. Easy in their openness, quick to laugh out loud at anything remotely funny, and genuinely curious, the world’s first wide exposure to Americans must have been entertaining at a minimum. Ok, ok, I do like where I live and I’m biased, but it does crack me up to think about some jamoke from Southie roaming around the globe in a sailing ship. But again, this is about a radio show.

For the past twenty-five years, a couple of brothers from Cambridge (“aaah feh city”) have been hosting a radio show on National Public Radio once a week (and for 35 years over all). It’s called Car Talk (“Caaah Taaahhk”). The show's hosts, Tom and Ray Magliozzi (a/k/a Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers), are graduates of MIT, are owners of a repair shop Cambridge, Massachusetts, and are bearers of accents that make Kennedys sound like Roosevelts. The premise of the show is that the guys field phone calls from listeners about their car troubles. Sounds simple enough. The subjects frequently proceed into the real issues at hand – relationships, travel tips, dispute resolution, buyers advice and remorse, dealing with dim-witted brothers, lazy mechanics, and so forth. I’m not particularly a car guy and, though I have learned a fair bit from listening to Tom and Ray over the years, any information I get about cars has been secondary to why I’ve been listening. The guys are simply funny in a totally unpretentious, incredibly inclusive and endlessly entertaining way. Mostly, the guys crack themselves up and they manage to crack me up as well. This past week, much to the chagrin of their many fans, Tom and Ray announced that they will be retiring from live radio. As one of them noted: if my brother retired, how would we know? I like to think of Click and Clack as refurbished, updated ambassadors of our particular sensibility and character here in New England, carried on the airwaves instead of by clipper ships. And yes, I do realize that’s a stretch but work with me here.

In my years as a ski race coach, I hit the road with the team every Friday night for our weekend of collegiate races and would time our departure so we could all listen to Tom and Ray on the radio. In the few years when I was out of the ski business and in the dark world of the weekend warrior, Tom and Ray again accompanied on my every-weekend drives to the mountains. Now that I’ve been at it full-time in the ski business for well over a decade, Tom and Ray accompany me in a different way. I download their podcasts to my iPod and listen to them while I ride the spin bike at the gym I use in New Zealand in the summer/winter/whatever. I miss my bicycle while I’m away and I hate spin classes, so I close myself in the spin room of the gym when there’s nobody else in there and I listen to the boys. By mid-season in Wanaka, there’s enough sunlight still outside when I get to the gym that I’ll set up shop in the spin room with the lights off. The problem is that I get lost in listening to Car Talk and occasionally can be found alone in a dark spin room, sweating profusely, and laughing out loud all by myself. It’s given quite a fright to a few people over the years, but it makes me happy. What can I say?! There I am, as far from the ports of New England as one can get, finding some entertainment in the sounds of the people from home, the personalities from home, in a way that has unified my various experiences in the ski business. They’ve traveled with me all these years, and I’m grateful for them.

Car Talk will continue on the radio in a ‘best of’ format for years to come and I have a library of back episodes of the show that I have yet to hear. I’ll be able to listen to them for some time. Still, it’s a little bittersweet, the end of an era. So, going forward, it’ll take just a little longer to explain to people why every cab and limo driver in the world is referred to as Pikup Andropov, customer service people as Heywood Jabuzoff, and law firm partners as H. Louie Dewey. They’ll be missed, but I’ll still be laughing, by myself, in the dark, on the bike. Thanks guys!

For more on Car Talk and Tom and Ray's decision to retire, go to:
http://www.cartalk.com/content/time-get-even-lazier

Newport, New Hampshire in June

Tanned Feet

A typical securities industry disclaimer says something to the effect that ‘past performance is not an indication of future performance’, and it’s just like snow storms in autumn. Pre-season snow may excite us, but it is not an indication of a snowy winter to come. Still, all of us, myself included, reserve the right to become giddy when it does snow in autumn. At a minimum, it reminds us how much we love skiing and riding and it brings some of the details to the front of our minds as we make plans for the approaching winter. Even the simple motions of getting ready for winter – changing to snow tires, pulling our winter clothing out of basements and back closets, and trying to locate boot heater batteries – are elevated and become worthy of excitement and giddy anticipation.

This is equally true for Southern Hemisphere winters, though with some funny wrinkles for me. Instead of slowly evolving my wardrobe into warmer clothing, with flip-flops and shorts slowly finding their way to the back of closets and the bottoms of drawers as I do here in October, I sit and contemplate all of those funny winter details while enjoying the benefits of warm weather and sunshine. There’s nothing quite like sitting outside on my favorite beach chair reading in the warm sunshine while contemplating which down coat and how many pairs and which weight of long underwear bottoms to have with me in Wanaka, New Zealand for the winter. I consider packing shoes and socks necessary for life in a small town where I walk everywhere and don’t have use of a car, where I look for housing close enough to town to pack groceries into a backpack on my way home from work and can make it to my weekly pub quiz on time without rushing.

A newly-hatched dragonfly and friend.

The forests here in Vermont have now fully evolved into that rich, yellowy-green of pre-summer foliage and the hardwoods are covered in newly full-sized leaves. Memorial Day weekend was gorgeous – sunny, warm, unhurried for me, and a wonderful reminder of summer. Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, there is snow on the peaks of the Southern Alps and several New Zealand ski fields have announced early openings. It’s downright exciting, and the bigger the contrast between the season here and the season there, the happier I’ll be. Ultimately, one fun sign of the perfect transition from Northern to Southern Hemisphere for me is to be sitting in a ski school locker room in the Southern Alps and taking a fond look at flip-flop tanned feet before shoving them into my Nordicas for the day. If I get to walk through LAX in shorts and sandals while carrying my ski bag over my shoulder, all the better! It’s these contrasts that make my choice of on-and-off season so odd for people trying to grasp what I really do for a living, and I definitely revel a bit watching them grapple with it.

Pre-season snow may not be an accurate indicator of a snowy winter, but it definitely helps me get excited and focused. I leave for New Zealand next week, and I’m looking forward to the confused looks of the folks in LA. More importantly, I’m very much looking forward to putting my suntanned feet into ski boots and going skiing!

Lake Winnipesaukee, surrounded by New Hampshire's White Mountains

Baking Bread

I was very lucky recently to spend several days in France, my first time there in quite a while. I was in the very un-touristy part of Brittany called Finistère (translating to “Lands End”), a region filled with rolling green countryside and tiny little villages separated by vast swaths of farmers’ fields. It’s gorgeous, and the mix of coastal climate, Breton culture and language (and tough-to-understand accents), and the absence of tourists made for a wonderful if not brief immersion. My fond memories of France and the French were more than reinvigorated. And then there was the food.

I stayed in a modest house in the middle of a village similar in size to Ludlow, Vermont but more compact. The main square abutted the medieval church and the old commercial buildings housed an unremarkable collection of businesses – bank branches, a super market, a couple of bars, and an amazing number of hair salons.  Then, around the corner from where I stayed, on the main street, just down the block from the church square, is one absolutely incredible boulangerie and patisserie. The thing that makes this haven of excellent food in this slightly out-of-the-way place so incredible was how normal it is for everyone there. The boulangerie is clean, inviting and the people are very friendly, but nothing about it is designed for tourists, it is not intended to draw in a wider clientele and it is in no way gentrified. The place simply serves the needs of the local people, that being the making and serving of exceptionally delicious food (exceptional only if you're not French, I guess). And by delicious, I mean mouth-wateringly, roll-your-eyes and hold-your-belly, spend-time-before-going-fantasizing-about-the-food good. Breakfast each day consisted of pain au chocolat, naturally, and each day included one or two baguettes depending on the lunch plan.

The baguettes from this place make the breads sold here at home under the same name seem somehow to be improperly identified. Color: golden brown. Tap the outside and they sound hollow. Want to break off a piece? Just bend it slightly and the crust gives way to the lightest and most flavorful inside. So often when we eat fresh bread here at home, even if from a great bakery, the inside is just gummy enough that we have to muscle off a piece and the crust scrapes at our mouths as we chew. It’s depressing. The baguettes in my new favorite food joint on the planet massage the mouth as you chew, the sounds of the easily cracked crust serving as the perfect opening act to the joys within.

Sorry, I digress. I do have a point to make here about skiing and teaching skiers (to say nothing of cooks, bakers and consumers). A lot of people spend a lot of time analyzing what makes greatness great. The physics of a baseball pitcher’s wind-up, the ability of a great striker to see and to create ways of scoring in soccer, the movements of a great golf swing, all fall under the analyst’s microscope. In my now favorite boulangerie,what makes the bread so great? Is it the water? The ancient brick oven? The wheat and the way it is milled? The quality of the air? The incantations of the bakers? Maybe they hum long forgotten Breton folk songs to the dough as they knead it. Who knows. Who cares. And that’s the point. Whatever it is, the key thing is to appreciate just how good it is, to view the bread in the context of the experience of tasting it in the environment in which one can find it, and to keep the memory of that experience wedded to my time there in Finistère.

As instructors, doing technical analysis of skiers, and understanding and then training the specific details of technique is a major component of our jobs. It’s an essential skill set that take years of practice, and it provides an important service to our guests, the staff that we train, and to our industry and our sport. Still, sometimes, we need to be able to sit back a bit, look at the totality of what we see in someone’s skiing (even in our own skiing) and say “wow, that’s awesome”, without breaking it down into bits. More importantly and at times more difficult, once we’ve done the work with our students of breaking down the details so as to improve their skiing (and their understanding of skiing), it’s essential to bring back that most simple level of appreciation. The ultimate result of someone moving their inside ankle a certain way during the initiation phase of the turn shouldn’t be that they feel their inside ankle (although that helps). The ultimate result should be that it brings their skiing to the next level and it feels really cool! It’s our job to keep that perspective close at hand even while we focus on the details, and that is an art form found in only the best bakers and the best instructors. Hmm, suddenly I’m hungry for more.

All of The Ingredients

In spring, metaphors bloom in the minds of would-be writers like early-season daffodils. Something about warm sunshine and greening pastures following on the heels of a long, cold winter encourages otherwise pedestrian thinkers to wax philosophical. The problem is that it happens to me as well. It really is an amazing phenomenon and, truthfully, I don’t mind even if it does crack me up a bit. This year, however, the timing has been a bit off.

The past few weeks here in Vermont have been wonderful spring skiing weather. Temperatures never really strayed above the mid-40’s Fahrenheit, we had a good, consistent wind across the summit of Okemo as we do in winter, and we had a decent amount of sunshine. We even had a bit of snow. Perfect, except that we had no skiing. If we’d had a normal snowpack this past winter we’d have been fine, but the exceptionally hot end of March simply devastated Okemo’s (and everyone else’s) snow and we shut the doors early. To be perfectly frank, I ski a ton of days each year and, other than the resulting financial pinch, I don’t normally mind when the season winds down. The problem this year is that what would have been great April skiing weather was lousy weather for just about anything else. I do love cycling and am very devoted to it, but when I have to dress warmer to be on the bike than I did on the last day I skied, cycling can devolve into mere exercise. I do put in the hard miles as a down payment for those warm days when I can really find peace of mind in the saddle, but it’s just not the same. Until today, that is.

Today is April 14th, and in many ways it’s the official kick-off of my off-season. My definition of a perfect off-season day includes some of the following: when not wearing shoes for cycling, hiking, or other outdoor activity I wear only flip-flops; when not engaged in some outdoor activity I mostly sit and read a good book in the sunshine; my trusty old beach chair becomes a more integral a piece of furniture than anything else in my house; fresh air circulates around my house like a transfusion; my neighborhood here along the flanks of Okemo is so devoid of human activity that a big gust of wind is the loudest noise interfering with my enjoyment of the sounds of the woodpeckers hammering away in the trees; and my car sits idle. The air smells sweeter, the sky seems bluer, food tastes fresher and is, and my blood pressure drops precipitously below its mid-winter high. I am not tired, my knees and back do not ache, and I have some well-earned soreness in my legs from my morning ride. Fantastic.

There is still a fair bit of skiing going on in resorts around the United States this week, but none of it is here in the East. Would I be happy if we’d had a normal winter and those of us here in Vermont were still enjoying all that spring skiing has to offer? Absolutely. Until today, I was wishing that we were, but with the warm sunshine and light breeze in our quiet town, I’m perfectly happy to have started my off-season in earnest. People often ask how I endure two winters each year, and in response I explain that I get to experience spring twice. I’m not being disingenuous when I say that a great spring can make it all worthwhile, especially when at the tail end of a lot of great powder days. Today, even without those great powder days, it’s still working out just fine.

My book is sitting on my beach chair on the porch, so pardon me while I go back outside. I strongly recommend that you do the same.

123 Days

A field in Grafton, Vermont three weeks ago.

As I write, it is the last week of March, the mid-day temperatures are hovering around the freezing mark outside my front door, and it’s been flurrying lightly on-and-off all day. With those details, and only those details in mind, it’s a pretty normal day in Vermont for this time of year. Unfortunately, those are not the pertinent details. Last week, for the entirety of the week beginning on March 18th, the temperatures were hot. Africa hot. Ridiculously, astonishingly hot.

On Sunday, the 18th, I saw several firsts. I saw snow melting so fast on our bump runs that water – clear, blue water – was pooling in the troughs of our zipper-line bumps and cascading from one trough to the next. Trails that in the morning were skiing well were virtually impassable by the end of the day. Water was literally pouring out of the forest floor, choking the culverts and seasonal stream beds. The creeks that run underneath some of our lifts had so much runoff in them that what began in the morning as a slow, murky normal-looking flow evolved into clear fast-moving water by the day’s end. Water was moving everywhere, filling every ditch, divot and dent, beneath sunny blue skies on an otherwise glorious day. The most amazing feature of that day, however, was the morning fog. As the lifts began turning at Okemo, the base areas and all of Ludlow’s low-lying river valleys were filled with an incredibly dense fog that was also incredibly cold. I began my first lift ride of the day concerned that I had underdressed. Immediately upon rising above the fog on the lift, I was hit from the side with a genuinely hot wind, such that with five feet of elevation rise the temperature increased fifteen degrees Fahrenheit (and that’s conservative)! Absolutely bizarre, and it stayed that way until the fog lifted by late morning, bringing the heat all the way down to the base of the resort.

On Thursday and Friday of last week, I attended a PSIA event at Mount Snow, a bit more than an hour south of here, and drove down there in flip flops and shorts. Comfortably and, I might add, happily. I’d never seen anything like it – the highs on Thursday were in the mid-70’s Fahrenheit and on Friday it hit 80 (that’s almost 27 degrees Celsius)! I can’t believe that none of the many instructors attending events there suffered from heat stroke. I still can’t believe it. By the end of the day on Thursday, each route open to skiing from the top of Mount Snow to the base of the resort required at least some walking across mud that separated the snow fields. The very idea of a trail being divided into “snow fields” at a resort that recently invested in a couple of hundred fan guns (the latest technology in snowmaking) is difficult to contemplate.

Needless to say, despite heroic efforts by our mountain operations team all season long, Okemo shut for the season this past Sunday, March 25. Whether it’s a result of Mother Nature working against us or simply never showing up this year is something that will be the subject of much conversation over beers in Ludlow this summer, but winter never really showed up. I’m not sure what our total snowfall was for the 2011-12 season, but it was small. Very small. Add to it unusually warm weather throughout and the dearth of natural snow left us totally and completely reliant on snowmaking – thank Heavens we’re so good at it here. Amazingly, I actually managed to have a reasonably good season on the hill, thanks in no small part to a wide range of responsibilities here and elsewhere and some very keen, very enthusiastic, very devoted and very tough guests with whom I ski. In a normal season it is the guests that keep me focused and enjoying my work here in the mountains, and this year my gratitude to them and to our terrific staff is immense and hard to quantify. Thanks to everyone for keeping my spirits afloat – literally, I suppose.

Our season here at Okemo began three weeks late and ended about three weeks early, and left us with 123 days of skiing and riding. That’s it. Honestly, in a winter like this one, Okemo is an especially great place to work, with all the stresses and frustrations that accompany a career devoted to snow that never really arrived. I am certain that the effects on our business will be ongoing for a few years to come. I am equally certain that the prognosis for our resort is good, from a financial perspective and for our spirits. Next winter will be snowier. It has to be. And I’m willing to bet the ranch on it.

Sage Wisdom

There’s a lot of ski advice out there. Too much. It’s amazing to me, as someone who has devoted my career to teaching and coaching skiing that so much of the advice out there is so bad. Seriously, a lot of the things people consider to be good advice is incredibly outdated, amazingly misunderstood, or simply just plain awful. I’m not quite sure what it is about reading back issues of ski magazines, having skied in Jackson Hole, or having a child who is a ski racer that makes people think they are qualified to give ski advice but, alas, it’s the world I inhabit.

Beyond the ski advice and concepts discussed at suburban cocktail parties (which can be downright scary), instructors themselves often fall into the vortex of hyper-complication, a close cousin of bad ski advice. This can and often does lead to the dreaded condition known as ‘paralysis by analysis’ in our guests. Obsessing about what angle our inside ankle is at the top of a turn or some minute difference between a skier’s right and left turns may be interesting to discuss among ourselves, but burdening our guests with them without proper perspective can be incredibly counterproductive. To say nothing of being completely un-fun (there’s that pesky fun thing again).

The qualification about keeping details in proper perspective is critical – when we teach in a way that enhances our students understanding in the big picture, the details of technique fall into place in a coherent way that makes it easy to teach technically without muddying the waters. Not everyone we teach is a gifted athlete, but if we communicate well, if we explain concepts in a way that our guests understand, the ‘technique’ we are teaching never devolves into “because I said so”. Throwing the book at people, hammering them with the ‘proper’ technique, and drilling them without apparent purpose or sufficient understanding in laymen’s terms is a great recipe for impressing them with our knowledge and our skill, and it also ensures that skiing and taking ski lessons becomes a chore. If we’re out to impress our guests, to prove to them how not good they are in an effort to get them to work hard at their skiing, perfect. If we want to be their guides to a lifetime of better, stronger, more exuberant skiing full of discovery and joy, perhaps the lock-step hierarchical teaching of the past is not the way forward.

None of this is news to anyone who is familiar with modern teaching of any subject, and that’s certainly true for those of us well versed in the American Teaching System of the Professional Ski Instructors of America. Still, I think it bears reminding ourselves of where our priorities lie.

With that in mind, one of our instructors here at Okemo related to me recently the best advice about skiing and ski teaching he’d ever heard. This instructor has been a fully-certified instructor since the 1950’s, he’s been everywhere, skied with some of the true greats of the sport, and is the last person to get into a detailed conversation in the locker room about technique. He’s also a bit of an alter cocker (to throw a little Yiddish at you – think Stadler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show and you’ll understand). What was the advice? It came from a trainer he had a million years ago named Bruno Juli, and it was this: never move any equipment or body part that you don’t have to, and never move anything unless you know precisely why you’re moving it. Maybe my friend is simply old enough and has seen enough change to keep things solidly in the big picture. Maybe, but it’s far more likely that the old sonofabitch is simply right.

A Bird's Eye View



SIA Stratton on-snow demo

Every job, every profession, every past-time has its own subculture, its own idiosyncrasies and oddities, and the snowsports industry is no exception. Far from it. Go deeper, take a look at the working life of ski and snowboard instructors, and things become peculiar very fast. Maybe I’m just a bit self-conscious about it, or maybe we just get a little weird. Entire conversations go on ad nauseam in The Loft about the way we articulate our ankles in our ski boots. I know ski instructors that actually comfortably use the word ‘fore-agonal’ in sentences, and in front of guests for crying out loud! Just because my particular micro-culture may have the cache value of a healthy, lifestyle-driven outdoor sport doesn’t mean that it doesn’t get a bit ridiculous at times.

One of the problems of working so hard to make a living in such a comparatively small and nuanced profession is that we often have trouble picking our heads up above the water, so to speak. I’m pretty lucky in this regard – I have a wide range of responsibilities in the industry, here at Okemo and elsewhere, so I tend to get frequent glimpses of the big picture by necessity. Among the more gratifying ways in which I’ve been exposed to another side of the business over the past eight years or so has been my relationship with Nordica, the venerable Italian ski equipment manufacturer. My role with Nordica is pretty simple – I ski on their equipment, promote the brand with guests and pros alike, liaise with our retailers and generally lend a hand when my friends at the company need it. It’s a lot of fun, the insight into the direction equipment is going and why, and how the equipment side of the business works in general is always interesting and really helps me provide a better and more complete sense of the world of skiing to my guests and to the instructors I train. This season has been particularly valuable in this regard as I’ve been working a bit with my friends at The Boot Pro, a successful specialty boot and ski retailer here in Ludlow that is a big Nordica dealer. I’ve learned a ton from them and, combined with my work with Nordica, I’ve now seen how the manufacturers look at sales, how the retailers look at sales, and how the consumers approach the whole process. As I said, at the end of the day the most important piece of all of this is that it helps me become a better and more complete ski teacher and really assists me in providing the highest level of service I can to my guests to enhance their skiing experiences. And it’s genuinely fun and a welcome change.

Speaking of fun, I recently had a day that drew together numerous aspects of my place in the ski industry all at the same time. For the first time, I attended the Ski Industry Association on snow demo at Stratton Mountain Resort here in Vermont. It’s an event that is essential for the manufacturers and for the retailers as they button up their sales for the following season. It’s a huge show, with every major ski and snowboard equipment manufacturer bringing their lineup for next year and every retailer in the Eastern US testing as many pieces of equipment as they can for three days. The schwag flies, everyone talks the talk, and it’s a non-stop equipment and schmoozing hootenanny. Totally cool and a lot of fun. I was at Stratton wearing three different hats: as a Nordica Elite Team member I needed to familiarize myself with next year’s lineup; as a Boot Pro employee I needed to ski on some of the equipment we’re looking at for our shop next year; and then in the afternoon I conducted a training clinic for Stratton’s instructors. Talk about being deep in the material. Honestly, the whole experience was a bit overwhelming and when I finally got on the hill with my clinic group in the afternoon it was almost a relief to simply get back into my comfort zone and work on skiing with ski instructors.

As a teacher, I often explain to my guests that their understanding of the big picture is essential and that we’ll dip down into the details that are important for their improvement as needed and incrementally over time. I like to make sure they are comfortable from a vantage point where they can see the curvature of the earth so that the details make sense in that big picture. For my own place in the industry, the varied exposure does just that – it helps me keep the details of my students’ skiing in perspective, helps me better understand their consumption options and decisions, and helps me guide them to a better, happier life as successful skiers. And it helps me get out of those annoying conversations in The Loft, especially when I run out of patience with people who insist on making up words like ‘fore-agonal’.

Sara and Alex from Boot Pro talking shop with Erica
from Nordica - all in the family at Stratton SIA!

Talk About The Weather

One of the funnier differences between my winters here in Vermont and my winters in Wanaka, New Zealand lies in how people look at the weather. In both places (and in the snowsports business generally), talking about the weather is not merely 'talking about the weather'. We really talk about it. It's a subject as important to us as it is to farmers trying to assess the prospects for this year's crops. Its importance goes beyond our prospects for business and good conditions. We're out in the weather, all day, every day.

In Wanaka, weather forecasts boil down to whether or not we're going to have a storm, what direction it will be coming from, and what kind of precipitation it will bring. Sitting as it does at the edge of a massive mountain range in the middle of an island in the Pacific, weather forecasting down there can take on a level of detailed speculation that can be somewhat daunting to those of us used to simpler weather patterns. Honestly, I don't have a long enough attention span to focus on all of the parameters for how the storms may or may not swirl around in the Southern Ocean and the Tasman Sea, whether they come from a direction that means it'll snow or rain, and whether they'll hit Queenstown, Wanaka, Christchurch or just pass us by. Everyone in New Zealand seems to have their favorite underground weather forecasting service, some revolutionary academic meteorologist with a website or some lunar faze forecasting service on which they depend. To me, the level of detail Kiwis like in their forecasts can leave me feeling as though I've been staring too long at a Seurat painting, unable any longer to see the picture beyond the dots. Let's just say that isobars don't really factor into our forecasts here in Vermont.

Here in Vermont, our forecasts are vastly simpler and our weather is far more complex than in New Zealand. Our weather either comes across the country up high or down low, and storms either pass right through or hit the coast and swirl back around. In New Zealand, weather forecasting doesn't really affect our days except for whether we need to dress for precip or break out the fat skis but here in Vermont, with temperature swings that can be dizzying, it affects every aspect of our daily lives. How we dress, what and how we eat, how early we need to get up in the morning to scrape the two inches of ice off of our cars, how well our cars function and how much gas we use in them, how we plan our days on the hill, what we teach to whom and how much. There are times when we'll have long discussions in the locker room at Okemo about how we're going to dress for the day – are we 'going to the weapons', mittens versus gloves, and so forth. Announcing to your friends that you're trying out a new layering system that includes a combination of merino and Capilene can be the source of a heated discussion of the benefits of pit-zips in down coats, Dermatone on the face, and whether second breakfast should be a muffin or if we should go big with a breakfast sandwich. Ski instructors can get serious applause for somehow being able to put on their uniform coat over a sleeping-bag-sized down jacket and still be able to move their arms!

This past weekend was a holiday weekend here in the USA celebrating the birthday (and the life and enormous contributions) of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As always seems to be the case on MLK weekend, we definitely had some weather with which to contend. Last Wednesday night and all day on Thursday, we received something in the range of ten inches of new snow. On Friday morning, as another front hit us, we had freezing rain that felt like musket fire pouring down on us from a hot air balloon as we skied, but it turned to snow quickly as the front passed and we received another couple of inches of pretty dry powder. Saturday was clearly among the best days of skiing of the year, with temps in the 20's and the snow very dry and light. Sunday morning, I awoke to temps that were near ten degrees below zero Fahrenheit, with the same again on Monday morning. On neither day did the temps climb out of the single digits above zero and wind chills remained in double digits below. Then on Tuesday, it started out cold and then warmed up enough to fog us in and drop some rain on us while skiing. I feel like I've been living in a Gore-Tex test lab! Ho hum, just a typical several days here in the Green Mountains.

For those folks who have never experienced the joys of trying to start a car with a frozen engine block, I've included the video clip above. For those of you who think you've experienced cold weather, I have news for you: until you've had to pour isopropyl alcohol in your car's gas tank or you've had electrical cables hanging out of your car's grill, until you've had to cover your face while walking outside in part to prevent frostbite and in part to allow the air you breathe to warm up enough to not choke you, until you've stood in your house trying to decide which two pairs of long-Johns to wear at the same time just to go to the grocery store, and until you've had in excess of four cups of hot chocolate in one day while teaching skiing just to stay warm, you probably haven't experienced real cold.

Ok, seriously, this past weekend wasn't that cold. It was pretty cold, we did have to dress carefully and cover our skin, and we did take a lot of breaks inside with our students, but we all kept some layering system in reserve just in case. After all, once we go to the nuclear option, there's simply no going back.

Now, about that next snow storm …