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.

A Teacher’s Pantry

I love to cook. I'm more of an enthusiastic cook than a good one, but I do love it. Ok, truth be told, I do really enjoy cooking but what I love to do is eat! Come to think of it, I'm pretty hungry right now. Hmm. Oh, sorry, I digress. I do have something to say about cooking and ski teaching here, so bear with me.

A good friend of mine who is a ski instructor here at Okemo is also a very gifted chef. He and his wife run a restaurant not far from Ludlow, Vermont that is an oasis of great food in an area that isn't exactly known for being the center of alpine gastronomy. Every Wednesday, my friends close their restaurant and hold cooking classes in its kitchen. The mis en place is moved out of the way, eight or so stools are set up on one side of the large prep area, and place settings and cutting boards are set in front of each place. After telling me last week how excited he was for Bistro Night and that there was still a seat available, I took up my friend's invitation and attended for the first time.

Before the cooking began, my friend passed to each of the guests a handout. On its pages were lists of ingredients for each dish to be prepared and one long list of items everyone should have in their pantry if they intend to prepare restaurant quality meals. The guests, myself included, all perused the pages and were surprised to find no instructions for the dishes, no recipes per se. Rather, the document contained only ingredients listed with approximate measurements and the pantry list. To the disappointment of a couple of the guests, the chef explained that he didn't like to follow recipes to the letter and that if we wanted to be able to prepare great meals, truly gourmet meals, we'd have to free ourselves from slavish recipe following as well. With the right ingredients found in a well-stocked pantry, an understanding of how each affected the 'flavor profile' of a dish, and some knowledge of how each is best cooked, great dishes are crafted with a little trial and error, constantly testing and modifying, and sometimes simply making it up as you go. My friend took great pains to tell us that cooking is not science and that if he had wanted to prepare dishes scientifically, he'd have been a baker.

It was a pleasure to watch him work. The chef walked us through the creation of some traditional bistro dishes and some less traditional ones, explaining as he went, providing some helpful tips about the cooking process, the ingredients he likes to use, and other details. All the while he tasted, adjusted, seasoned, told stories, fed us a little at a time to keep us from getting hungry or impatient, and in the end convinced us that great food is achievable by ordinary chefs. It dawned on me, in my duck breast and onion soup induced reverie, that what we were experiencing had all the same ingredients of a great ski lesson. Seriously.

The day that followed the bistro cooking class, after awakening to find that I was still in Vermont and not in the Haute Savoie, I conducted some training clinics for children's instructors at Stratton, something I do from time to time. The clinics were intended to help these mostly young instructors become better at creating activities in their lessons that would be technically valid, that would help develop the skiing skills of the children in their lessons, and that would be fun and engaging (that fun thing is pretty big). The title I created for the clinic was "Skills Focused Kids Activities". Informally, some people refer to these sorts of clinics as "bag of tricks" training. I really dislike the idea of "bag of tricks", and much prefer my own subtitle for this clinic. I refer to this clinic informally as "how to make stuff up", only I don't always use the word "stuff".

My point here is simple, if not verbose. In many ways, becoming a gifted children's instructor is far more difficult, far more nuanced, and requires far more attention than becoming a good adult instructor. With kids one has to understand the movements of skiing and be able to explain them in laymen's terms, one has to be able to identify and focus on one aspect of skiing in particular that will assist all of the students in a group. One must keep the class moving, keep it interesting, engaging, and fun. Yes, all this is true of adult lessons as well, but in the case of kids, instructors have to do all of this in a language and with an energy appropriate for their charges. It's a lot of work and it's a challenge, but it's a ton of fun.

So, like the class in my friend's kitchen, having a properly stocked pantry with fresh ingredients and a few interesting tricks up one's sleeve (Yuzu juice? Really?) is the start of a great lesson, but it's only the start. The process of creating a ski or snowboard lesson is far more craft than science, and the instructor's interaction with the students and awareness of their needs, their feelings, their movements, and their comprehension is the most important guide to how to put the final dish together.

For dessert, we're all going to learn how to ski in deep powder. It'll be the icing on the cake.

My friends John and Leslie own and operate Leslie's Tavern in Rockingham, Vermont. Their website is http://www.lesliestavern.com/, and information about their cooking classes, retail shop and other tidbits is available there. John cooks and Leslie bakes and runs the front of the house. If you go, make sure you arrive hungry.

Kids Rule!

One of the things I enjoy most about working for the Okemo Ski + Ride School is that we do not have separate children's and adult's instructors. We do have instructors who work specifically in our 4-7 year-old program, a necessity given the nature of that program, but those instructors also are expected to be able to teach all ages and to assist with older kids and adults as needed. What this means is that at Okemo there are no instructors who do not teach children.

This idea may seem ridiculously simple, but it is a rarity in the snowsports business. In many schools, teaching kids is still considered a lesser assignment - instructors are "sent down" to teach kids. Here at Okemo, we recognize that kids rule! Undergrads, retirees, lawyers, bankers, doctors, teachers, law enforcement officers, engineers, and full-time ski and snowboard pros all teach kids and adults. The resulting staff is one that is exceptionally at ease goofing around while teaching in a technically valid way. This really means that we are all outside playing with children and adults, playing hard, and loving it. It's an incredible source of joy, for us, for the kids and the adults we teach, and for the rest of their families. It makes for an incredibly rich work environment.

We're also an incredibly busy school, meaning that all of us spend lots of time with a great many kids, and a great variety of them. I'd stop short of saying that our guests look like a model United Nations in terms of diversity, unfortunately, but they do represent a wide array of families and, well, people. Though I am not a parent and certainly am no expert on parenting, it does provide me with terrific insight into the differences from child to child, and family to family. Some children are comfortable looking a strange adult (read: me) in the eye and having a conversation. Some children are shy at first but are still able to share in the fun and the learning in a meaningful way. Some kids are articulate, observant, analytical, curious, and intelligent. And some kids are genuinely funny, very funny. Messy and fastidious, focused and scatter-brained, distracted and aware, goofy and nervous; kids are just like adults, only far cooler and with far less baggage.

There certainly are occasions when we meet children that are difficult to handle or even unkind. Our reaction is almost universally one of trying harder to reach through to them, viewing it as a challenge and not an inconvenience. As instructors, we're by nature a hopeful bunch and we operate on the premise that with just the right tone, just the right set of experiences, and the right guidance from the world around them, those kids will grow into good people too.

And then there are the shining moments. Every so often, frequently when we need it most, we spend our time with kids who are such great people, such a joy, that they give us hope. Literally. With all that is wrong in the world and all of the difficulties of everyday life, spending the day skiing or riding with great kids really can help us feel better and more secure about the future of our world. It's wonderful, and those kids – and the families that nurture them – are a blessing for all of us in the truest sense. They rekindle our enthusiasm, remind us to not take ourselves too seriously, show us how cool the simplest things are and that we shouldn't take anything for granted. They make it easy for us to face challenges and to shrug off discomfort, difficulty, and disappointment. Oddly, aren't these the lessons we aspire to teach the children in our lives?

This weekend is a holiday weekend here in the USA, with all schools nationwide closed on Monday to celebrate the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Families will come here in droves for a little quality outdoor time and lessons will play an important role for many of them, adults and kids alike. I'm lucky to know the children I'll be skiing with already, and I care about them and their family a great deal. If you knew these kids and so many others with whom I am fortunate to spend my time skiing, you'd find hope for the future too.

The photo is of Uncle Russ and my peeps. Nothing comes between us and our ice cream!

New Day, New Year

In the thick of a very busy holiday season here at Okemo Mountain Resort in Vermont, I was treated to an exceptional sunrise this morning on my way to work. Luckily enough, I had my camera with me and was able to capture the image of the sun working its way through the cloud cover of the Connecticut River Valley. This stretch of time has been particularly busy for me and for Okemo, busy in a good way but in a way that does require a lot of energy. So, as has been the case for many years now, I'll be heading off to bed early instead of participating in more conventional New Years Eve festivities. A good dinner with friends and a good night's sleep is all I need, and I'll awake in 2011 looking forward to all that the new year has to offer.

Best wishes to all of my friends, family, colleagues, and guests for a healthy and happy 2011. May your year be filled with powder dreams realized and plenty of time spent playing outdoors in the mountains.

What’s a Cubit?

Let me be unambiguous: conditions at Okemo continue to be quite good, but the weather has been absolutely awful for the last two days. After a great several days of cold weather perfect for making outstanding quality snow last week, we've watched as much of our operations' team hard work has washed down our mountain and out into Vermont's rivers in a torrent. There were white caps in the Black River today, for crying out loud. Thankfully, Old Man Winter returned from his trip to Minneapolis this afternoon, bringing with him some natural snow and more cold weather.

Skiing in the rain is one of the hazards of being an instructor for a living. When even the most die-hard devotees take one look outside and opt instead for playing Parcheesi by the roaring fire, we're out there making it happen for whoever was so unaware of the forecast or who was so unfamiliar with skiing generally that they elect to take lessons in a downpour. The burden falls on the instructors to remain upbeat, to stay focused on the bright side, or simply to fake enthusiasm for the benefit of the guests while dreaming of a dry change of clothes. The truth is that once we're out in it, the snow can be a lot of fun when it's raining so while we may be reluctant to get out there, we enjoy it in the end. It's much like swimming in a cold murky lake – dip a toe in the water, hesitate, count to three five or six times before jumping in, and you later realize that it was far better than you imagined.

Having said all of this, when it rains like it has in the past 48 hours, I always am reminded of Bill Cosby's classic monologue about Noah and the ark. As a kid, my whole family would sit around and listen to the LP recording of it and never tired of asking in a booming, holier-than-thou voice "Noah, how long can you tread water?" Here's a link to a youtube recording of the whole thing. I'm not sure if it's a legal recording or not, I'm not sure who took the time to upload it, and it's just audio and no video, but it's worth a listen. It reminds me how amazingly funny Cosby was and still is, and it always makes me laugh on a rainy day like this one. Enjoy.