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 …

A Skiing Fountain Pen

Cold smoke powder, Okemo style!

There’s an old joke among Jews that upon becoming a Bar Mitzvah, a young man announced “Today, I become a fountain pen.” There’s a lot of historical context to the joke that’s not particularly relevant to the modern, gentile world (legal adulthood and the right to sign for oneself), but its deep-seated meaning still cracks up those of us in the tribe. And not just when we’re skiing in the Catskills.

In a funny way (not funny ‘ha-ha’, more funny ‘hmmm’), I had the distinct pleasure of being involved in a series of events over the holiday week that culminated in a young man becoming a fountain pen, in the skiing sense. I taught a three hour private lesson one afternoon to a ten-year-old from New Jersey who was getting on skis for the first time – let’s just call him Chris. Before we even got started, Chris assured me that he wasn’t going to be very good and that I shouldn’t expect too much from him that day. Naturally, as an instructor, I viewed this as a challenge and told him as much. Needless to say, despite some struggles and crashes of the normal variety, Chris finished up his first ever three hours on skis by lapping our long beginner’s Magic Carpet lift and making some pretty nice wedge turns down the adjacent hill. In speaking with his somewhat overwhelmed parents afterwards, I made clear that my expectations were for him to move to the chairlift quickly the next time he skied, despite his significant fear of heights. From there, things just snowballed. On afternoon two, we moved from the carpet lift to chairlift (lots of giggling and knee slapping there when his fear quickly turned to thrill), we made a bunch of runs on the lower part of our mountain, cleaned up his balance and rounded out his turns, and generally had a grand old time. On afternoon three, with our poor snow cover so far this season limiting our terrain options, we stayed on the lower mountain and discovered how much our bodies appreciate it when our skis are parallel. Then came day four, the big one, all day together, for bragging rights and all the marbles (an expression I had to explain – I guess there is no Wii marbles game).  We practiced on easy terrain, took a deep breath, hopped on the summit quad, took in the distant views, and skied like champs from the top of the mountain on trails of ever-increasing difficulty.

This progression is nothing unusual or ground-breaking, I know, but there’s more. When we met on the morning of day four, Chris’s parents informed me that they’d given him enough money for the day to take me out for a nice lunch – also not terribly unusual. After several long runs, lunch loomed large in young Chris’s mind. Someone, something (definitely not me), had whispered the words “Kobe burger” in his ear and it stuck. Off we went. We entered Epic, the restaurant in our Solitude Day Lodge, and when we announced ourselves at the hostess stand, Chris and I conferred and agreed that given that he was buying and that he’d just spent the morning knocking ‘em dead on the big mountain, he should order only from the adults’ menu – no mac and cheese or chicken fingers for this little dude. In a very cute moment, he did apologize to me for ordering a kid size Pepsi, hoping it was OK.

We sat there for a while, chatting away like two buddies just catching up over a burger. Then he asked the waiter for the check, and it brought down the house. It could have been anywhere and we could have been anyone, and the normalcy of the two of us sitting there, ordering fancy-pants burgers off the adult menu in the middle of a ski day that involved such wonderful accomplishments as though it happened every day was just so cool, such a gift to both of us, that we spent a good chunk of the afternoon grinning like idiots.

It’s a running line of mine that we’re not making the world safe for democracy by teaching skiing and snowboarding; but sometimes, quietly, I do think we’re making the world safe for democracy by teaching skiing and snowboarding. In this case, though I don’t want to overstate the importance of our time together, I am confident that the experience of learning to ski, of getting on the lift, of succeeding in skiing from the summit, of ordering a great lunch and paying for it, like a man and not like some kid, was important to Chris for a million reasons that have nothing to do with skiing. It certainly wasn’t the first time I’ve taught a great kid how to ski and it won’t be the last. As the expression goes, this isn’t my first rodeo. At all times, skiing is a wonderful experience, and at the best of times skiing is merely a delivery mechanism for a wide range of other things, other experiences and opportunities. In this particular case with all of its circumstances, it was pretty darn cool to be there when my student became a fountain pen, a skiing fountain pen. With a big juicy Kobe burger to prove it.

A Snow-Deprived Stupor

New Year's Day sunrise, 2012

It's been an interesting season so far. A late start, some pretty dicey conditions, oddly warm weather and serious challenges for all of us in the ski business. Thanks to some good luck, a healthy dose of help from my friends and clients, and some perseverance, I managed to have had an exceptionally busy and fruitful holiday period from which I am pretty exhausted. I'll free ski a bit this week, catch up on some work, teach a little, run some staff clinics, and generally get my head together and recover. When all that happens, I'm hoping that my writer's cramp disappears and that I'll find some interesting and pithy way of sharing some of what I've been thinking about over the past month. Until then, I'm experimenting with a new way of cooking pasta sauce that demands my attention and an early bed time that is looming.

Best wishes to everyone for a healthy, happy, and exceptionally snowy 2012.