Skiing alone is fine. It’s just not as fun as skiing with your best friends. But the good friends want you to go even when they can’t. You will then have stories to tell and new friends to meet.
One of the quiet pleasures of a day on the mountain is the conversation that happens on chairlifts with strangers. The lift ride is just long enough to trade a story or two before gravity separates you. I rode the Heaven’s Gate chair with an elderly gent and a twenty-something young woman. I confessed immediately to making the lone track down Organ Grinder that morning. It was a total moonscape with inadequate fresh snow in the troughs. The bumps were dimpled like a golf ball with a tooth rattling refrozen surface.
The older gent said something about regret, and it felt like a perfect segue into a quote from the Freudian-era psychologist Karen Horney: “Self-accusations are amoral in origin and immoral in effect—because they keep the individual from soberly examining his existing difficulties and thereby interfere with his human growth.”
They easily processed this feminine wisdom, and we concluded, rather sensibly, that the world would be a better place if women were in charge. God knows they’re smarter.
Another day, with limited lift access at Mount Ellen, I rode Inverness with a man and his twenty-something daughter. She was a graduate of GMVS and seemed quietly confident about her skiing ability. Inverness was glowing in the sunshine and draped with a dramatic edging of B-netting and hardly a soul on the hill. I followed her turns along the skiers’ left.
As expected, she skied beautifully clean arcs, smooth transitions, moving gracefully but with power from one turn to the next. I figure-eighted her turns and enjoyed the size and shapes that she made as the pitch and snow conditions changed. I kept up on the first two faces. Her speed built with every turn, and by the time the trail flattened she was far ahead, and much faster to the lift. Her dad joined us for another lift ride and enroute she wondered about the skiers who will struggle as the snow transitioned from evenly groomed to thicker, denser piles. I suggested that that is called a skier’s “touch,” isn’t it? The subtle adjustment of fore and aft pressure.
All the local skiers seem to agree on one thing: this season will be remembered. Ask anyone how it was and the answer comes back—No ice, the words, combined, voiced in the local vernacular, NOICE!
It has been a strangely quiet year on the mountain. Maybe skiing feels quieter because it stands in such contrast to everything else going on in the world. Or maybe there’s actual physics involved. Fresh snow absorbs 50%–90% of sound energy. Snow literally quiets the world. For a brain constantly overstimulated by screens and noise, that silence is soothing.
Driving up the Sugarbush Access Road in the late morning, the dashboard thermometer reads 32 degrees Fahrenheit or Zero Celsius—the line separating cold rain and snow. At that temperature, with a little sunshine, the mountain begins its slow shift toward spring. Snow slides off metal roofs in sudden sheets. Water in the brooks gathers speed and volume. Ice begins to lose its grip. The roads are full of mud.
Zero Celsius is also the current exhibit at Mad River Valley Arts. This exhibition examines snow/winter as both material, concept, and metaphor: fleeting, crystalline, silent, yet deeply tied to global systems of water, ecology, and human life. Right in Waitsfield!
Skiers borrow things from one another over the years. Not skis or poles—habits.
From a very disciplined Masters racer, a few years older than me, I picked up a tendency toward crisply finished sideburns. His effect was simple: look sharp, be sharp, ski sharp.
From a few otherwise disciplined British Columbian ski bums I absorbed another philosophy entirely—top-to-bottom, 5000 vertical, non-stop skiing. Explore widely. Respect the mountains but treat “closed” signs more like suggestions than dictates.
Somewhere along the way skiing becomes something more than recreation. It turns into a kind of wandering search. Lately I’ve been thinking of it as a Henry David Thoreauvian journey—an exploration in search of what is good. Which, of course, leads to the question Robert Pirsig posed through Phaedrus in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: What is the good?
On certain days, the answer seems obvious.
A B-netted stretch of Inverness, freshly groomed and glowing in the sun. Wide open faces. You drop in and imagine that if you were somewhere exotic—Andorra perhaps—with a multilingual guide and a few thousand feet of high-altitude European powder behind you, you might crest a rise and find this exact scene waiting. An empty, sunlit trail. Perfect corduroy. The red B-netting heightening the drama on both sides.
In moments like that, the answer to Phaedrus’ question becomes very simple.
Skiing is good.
