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.