Taking the Weight Off My Shoulder ... Season

Body in off-season, feet on snow. Last week.

Normal people refer to the season in between summer and winter as “fall”, with “spring” on the other end of the year. Here in Vermont, we also refer to them as “stick season” and “mud season” respectively, which are accurate descriptions of the hillsides up here. Those of us who ski and snowboard year-round and never have summer simply refer to them, inclusively, as “shoulder season”.

Like all seasons, we can wax poetic about shoulder season being a time of renewal, a representation of the cycle of life and our place in the world, and the rhythm of the natural world. Over the last several years, my view of shoulder season has been a bit more pedestrian, and necessarily so. It’s been a time of intense administrative effort. A time to get the very big and very complex business of snow sports teaching either up and running or wound down and planned for the following year. Fall in particular is about getting the entire organization up to speed from a standing start, involving a ton of disparate moving pieces, none of them simple and most of them people. Not this year. This year, I’m squarely back in metaphor-land, shoulder season as a gradual transition of place, work, rest and activity, climate, culture, cuisine, time zone. This year also, the transition involves turning my attention to a wonderful combination of new and old details and activities, each of them familiar but all put together in new and different ways for a fresh start in the new season.

Having decided mid-way through my “summer winter” in New Zealand to leave behind management for the time being, my timetable and the way I experience the seasons is now quite different. It is far less rushed, the transition is far longer, and it is far less busy. I continued to work at Cardrona through the end of the NZ season and then remained in Wanaka for a couple of weeks to do, uhh, stuff. After a wonderful spring of skiing in the brilliant Kiwi sunshine and getting to experience the joys of an easy wind-down to an extraordinarily busy season, I’m pretty confident that I did in fact do some stuff down there. I can’t exactly put my finger on all of the stuff, but it definitely included some fun dinner parties, some nice walks in the hills, and a couple of road trips with good friends. I’m pretty sure. Oh, I may have occasionally drank beer in the sunshine on the deck of our house, and if that happened I’m pretty sure that we would have taken the time to watch the sun drop below the mountains in the distance. It would have been important. Regardless of how acute my recollection may or may not be, all of the stuff I may have done (or not done) definitely was healthy for my mind, body and spirit.

In one respect, this shoulder season is a toughy. Spring in Wanaka is stunning (oh man, it’s shocking down there) and I arrived home to Vermont post-foliage, post- warm weather, and pre-ski season. Still, it’s great to be home, in my own house, drinking brewed coffee, with easy access to decent sandwiches and excellent burritos, driving on the right side of the road, and sleeping in my own bed. More importantly, as I look ahead to winter, I’ll stay here at home, in my own home, in Ludlow.

After four successful and rewarding seasons as Director at Sugarbush, I’ll remain in Ludlow, work for the Okemo Ski & Ride School (not far from my front door), and generally give myself a break to enjoy the simple life of working as an instructor and coach. That happiness thing, it’s pesky, but I think I’m on to it. The longer, easier shoulder season seems, forgive me, to have taken the weight off my shoulders.

The only folks unhappy about my choice to remain home are the field mice. They apparently had their run of the house this summer winter, but in winter winter it is my domain and they’d better watch out.

Mishegoss in The Mountains

The view up the hill behind my house in Ludlow, Vermont

It’s mishegoss, I’m telling you. Snow sports teaching, as an industry, is crazy. We face a litany of issues for our long-term viability: climate change, the hyper-competitive market for discretionary vacation dollars, the behemoth Rocky Mountain corporation gobbling up resorts and having a disproportionate effect on all of us (wasn’t the asking price for Whistler about 10 zillion simoleans?) … I can go on. It seems that every time I attend an event for us management-types or get into a discussion through PSIA about the health of the profession, it turns into a hand-wringing, doomsday exercise. Let’s face it, on a microeconomic level, ski teaching is a brutal way to make a living. We remain devoted through it all because instructors generally are a passionate bunch, our guests really do love it and, seriously, we didn’t get into this to become wealthy.

Still, there is a lot of good news out there, I’m truly optimistic we’ll be OK, and the proof for me lies in some surprising places. Why the rosy mindset, particularly during stick season? Well, because I’m in the middle of some serious administrative drudgery right now, and it’s gotten me excited for my upcoming season dedicated to our craft. Yes, that’s some serious mishegoss, but please let me explain.

The managers of the Okemo Ski & Ride School have taken pity on me by sliding me some work to get me through stick season. Wanting to be useful, I identified what I thought would be the best thing for me to do to make their lives easier and it’s the worst eye exam of a paperwork task that snow sports schools have to endure each fall. Yes, folks, it’s inputting instructor schedules into the computer scheduling and sales system. With software upgrades and web access, this is a lot easier than it used to be, but it’s still grunt work nonetheless. Each individual instructor submits their work days for the entire season; each has to be reviewed to make sure the needs of the school and their guests are likely to be met; and each has to be input manually so the sales staff and supervisors can do their jobs.

Vermont’s major resorts - Okemo, Sugarbush, Stratton, Mount Snow, Killington and Stowe - all have over three hundred instructors in their schools, the vast majority of whom work part-time for the season. Full-time schedules are easy: they pick the same day off each week, and they otherwise work every day and don’t get days off during the busy periods. Part-time staff schedules are another story altogether. Part-time instructor schedules can look a bit like they were placed on a tree during deer hunting season and shot through with buckshot. There’s no criticism there - these part-time folks have other conventional careers, kids in school and all kinds of family obligations or are in college themselves, have long drives to the resort and, seriously, normal lives that make it tough to sacrifice their weekends and holidays for six months a year in order to do wedge turns in our frigid Green Mountain winters. And seriously, just imagine a college kid who sacrifices all of the vacation time to work outside in the cold while making less money than they could at Starbucks and you get the idea. This is precisely why putting the part-time staff schedules into the system can be genuinely inspirational. Yep, it’s time to look up “mishegoss” in your Yiddish dictionary.

Here’s the point, finally. Schedule after schedule of part-time instructors are actually pretty simple. They include virtually every weekend all winter with one or two set aside for the “real world”, a PSIA update or some freeski time, and then a few mid-week days during the busy December holidays or Presidents Week. Boom, done. Some of these people have drives to Vermont as long as three or four hours every time they want to put their skis or boards on their feet, and yet they’ll be there at lineup and in the morning training clinics rearing to go, enthusiastic, and spreading the joy to our guests without flinching. It’s downright amazing, and that’s without even considering that they do all of it without any profit motive, which I’m sure would leave my undergraduate economics professors speechless.

Sure, these folks are getting older. Yes, I’d love to see many of them become a bit more open to continuing their evolution as skiers, riders and teachers. Of course, I wish that a greater number of them were equally dedicated young folks, filled with a passion for teaching snow sports and to their own ongoing, continuing professional development. More importantly, I do very much wish it were easier to keep the many amazing young folks we do have working in the industry – we need to hang onto them with two hands and give them every opportunity we can to succeed (a/k/a serve the Kool-Aid but not let it result in professional sugar crashes). Still, what these part-time instructors do and their thankless dedication to it cannot be underestimated and shouldn’t be left unappreciated. Ever.

Every Friday night this winter, the highways of the northeastern United States will be filled with an enormous number of dedicated instructors (and coaches, park staffs, lifties, patrollers, etc.) on their way to their second jobs in the mountains that they really love. I used to joke that if you want to see the best collection of race coaches I knew, sit in a booth at the Friendly’s restaurant in Greenfield, Massachusetts all night on a Friday night in winter, and they’ll be wandering in for a mid-trip hot meal on their way north. We are all working very hard to solve the vexing issues in our industry, but our hard-working part-time pros are the beating heart of it and they’re keeping it all together. It shows in their paperwork, plain and simple. And I may need another cup of coffee before doing the next batch of schedules.