Ski East

I grew up in the east, learned to ski in the east, and worked for the ski business in the east. Some of my most memorable ski runs were in the east.

Ski the East.

You want isolation and powdery glades? Have you ever been to Jay Peak, just five miles from the Canadian border? Jay Peak had more than 400 inches of snow last season. And Jay Peak had powder — I saw my skis disappear in it — last weekend.

You want craggy, adrenaline-charged challenges? Have you stepped off the Sugarbush resort’s intimidating Castlerock chair, where the trails are rocky, bumpy and will get you airborne? Have you stepped off just about any lift at the no-frills Mad River Glen, home of the “Ski It If You Can” bumper stickers?

The Club Fails

Ever hear about the Yellowstone Club?

Bad idea. And now it's gone broke.

Read about it from the ski bum perspective here.

I eventually learned that the Yellowstone Club had so few skiers that sensors were installed so lift operators would know when someone was actually riding a chair. Powder lasted for days and they had a run named EBITDA, which I learned stands for “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.’’ The employees were apparently treated well, but good luck trying to get an invitation to visit. For the masses, it was a mirage of a ski area, even though you could look down into it from Big Sky.

Buh Bye.

Trams

I always loved aerial lifts and trams. I remember as a kid skiing or when camping in the summer we would head up chairlifts and trams, to cheat the hike.

The tram is a rare thing in New England. Jay Peak has one, Cannon Mountain has one, but the balance are the smaller gondolas spread around the North.

I even have an aerial tram scale model made in Europe. Wish I had a place to hang it up.

Last year the tram at Jackson Hole was demolished, and they're building new one. Here's a short film that talks about the construction of the new Jackson tram, for you tram junkies out there.

84 Inches at Chimney Pond

My friend Pete and I once took a group of folks into Chimney Pond at Mt. Katahdin in Maine for a week of winter fun at 30 below zero. It was that trip that I skied slowly across the frozen South Basin pond during a light snowfall and understood how important wild places were to our being. We also headed up to the summit in full winter conditions and did some skiing high in the south basin. Some of the folks also tackled some climbs on the Pamola Ice Cliffs near the camp. It stayed very cold that whole week, and the snow was so deep we dug down into a shelter to set up our kitchen.

That was in 1986, when we were still getting normal winters with big snowpacks.

This year may be close to those old days as they have had a great deal of snow up in northern Maine this winter. Pete just got back from a trip there and sent this great shot looking down the saddle towards the Pamola Ice cliffs and South Basin Pond beyond them. Pete reported 84 inches on the ground.

It's Still Winter

Looking down the Plunge at Telluride, 3,000 feet of turns to Town

My high school had a great ski club and we would get up north to places like Stowe and Glen Ellen (now Sugarbush North) several times a winter. Our knees back then were flexible and strong, and we would crash down through the moguls, it was really a blast. Ten years later we did the same thing at places like Vail and my favorite western mountain, Telluride, but we were freeheeling then on skinny skis, which in my case tough on the knees, but still a blast.

So in honor of youthful knees, check out this list of top ten Mogul Resorts.

Monday Press Roundup

Missed this article last month, worth reading as the annual Christmas Bird Count is a great way to introduce kids to birding.

Dr. Butcher said that habitat loss, caused by “the tremendous growth of the megalopolis” around New York, has already caused the demise of the northern bobwhite, and “has had a pretty dramatic effect” on kestrel populations as well as other species here.

Audubon suggests that citizen action may help forestall the trend. The federal farm bill under consideration would call for wetlands and grasslands protection. It also includes the Conservation Reserve Program, which would encourage private landowners to set aside habitat land. Audubon welcomes grass-roots support for such legislative initiatives, and the Christmas bird count, society administrators say, can serve as a rallying point for this kind of organized advocacy. They also suggest remedies on the home front, like nurturing native backyard plants to create new bird habitats, but are concerned that a new generation of nature stewards is being lost to the lure of the indoor screen.

This Oped from Toledo Ohio hits the mark.

Paradise lost can't be found by watching a movie or playing a video game. But it's waiting outside to awe those drawn to its wonder. Seasonal offerings are open all year for anyone with the time and interest and need to reconnect with a world where man-made has no meaning. So consider taking a walk on the wild side before you become a bear to live with, growling about no time for anything but cheap gruel at the drive-through.

Winter activities in Wisconsin.

Now that Janice and Orlando Jansen, both 68, are retired, every day is a snow day.

Nature, even on the most frigid of winter days, is an adventure waiting to happen and to be shared with their local grandchildren, Eleanor, 10, and Alex, 8.

"There's so much to do (outside)," the Kaukauna woman said. "Our kids, when they were little, you'd have to tie them down to keep them in the house when there was a nice snowfall."

Unfortunately, the video gaming industry is booming.

"The video game industry set the pace over all others in 2007, with record-breaking sales, off-the-charts consumer demand, and innovation reaching from galactic exploration to guitar simulation," said ESA CEO and president Michael D. Gallagher. "On average, an astonishing 9 games were sold every second of every day of the year."

And Skiing in Colorado is down.

DENVER — The Colorado ski industry’s lift ticket sales fell 12.5 percent from the beginning of the season in October through Dec. 31 compared to the same period last winter, a state trade association announced Thursday.

Colorado Ski Country USA reported that its 26 member resorts logged about 2.87 million skier and snowboard rider visits during the first reporting period. A visit is defined as the purchase of a full- or half-day lift ticket. Ticket sales were down about 412,000 from a record-setting beginning to the season in 2006-07.

Getting Away From the TV

Here's a recent community calendar entry from Cuyahoga Valley NP.

Friday

Moonlight sledding — The National Park Service is sponsoring a moonlight sledding program from 7 to 9 p.m. at Kendall Hills in the Cuyahoga Valley. Meet at Pine Hollow off Quick Road in Boston Township. Bring your own sled. You might hear a few coyote howls. A hike will be staged if there's not enough snow. For ages 7 and up. Advance reservation required — call 216-524-1497.

If the idea of moonlight sledding can't get us away from the TV on a Friday night, what can? Moonlight skiing is also a blast. For those with more advanced skills, here's more on that from the Rocky Mountain News.

I once did a TV piece for WFSB in Hartford, where we went out skiing by moonlight in the wee hours of the morning. It was a blast and easy to do, all you need is good weather, snow and a full moon. No flashlights needed.

Friday Skiing

It's a bright and crisp day here in Northern Virginia, the day after a messy snow storm. For nine years, Fridays in January and February were always fun, because it was ski day at my daughter's school.

For decades, she and her classmates would head en masse to Bryce Ski Area. We're talking essentially the whole school goes to ski and snowboard. Every kid was required to take a lesson, and most participated in an end of the season mini-olympics competition. every kid was outside, on the mountain. No computers or televisions, although plenty of greasy food in the lodge. The head of the ski school even yodels to call them to the lessons. When kids start doing this in kindergarten, it makes skiing a sport for life for most of them.

So today, now that my daughter is in high school, I'm lamenting the loss of Friday ski day, and I'm sure she feels the same way.

The picture at the top is a screenshot from the Bryce webcam, today, Friday, and the kids you see are from the school.

Ski Notes Thursday

I'm really looking forward to doing some skiing next week with friends and family. Unlike the dismal snow season last year, there has been good snowfall thus far up north, and plenty of cold temps for additional snowmaking. I haven't had the chance to ski with my daughter in a year, and she is assuring me that her huge leap in ability will challenge me. We'll see about that.

When I was a teen, we lived to ski. We would occasionally have Warren Miller Films screened at our school, usually sponsored by the High School Ski Club. As cornball as Miller can be, his films are always a celebration of the sport that few have matched. And they come from a simpler time, where we reveled over the smell of burning Ptex, the graphics on the new Rossis, and fresh dumps of snow that seem less prevalent as our climate changes.

Miller once said:

For years I have been telling people: “Any job that you have in the city you can get a job doing the same thing at a ski resort. All you have to do is quit your job, rent a trailer, load it up and move to the mountains.”

Of course, that kind of thing is much harder to pull off in these days of million dollar condos and the notorious Jackson Hole 7-7-7 homes (seven bedrooms, 7,000 square feet, seven million dollars). Warren is livin in the past, but so what.

Even with the "ski porn" available today, Miller is still up there in my mind, as his storytelling always beats the sometimes cliche "huckin" and "yeah dude" dialogues in the more up to date films. Nowadays, Miller's films are produced by his son, and I look forward to this year's entry.

Here's a blog post on New West that Warren wrote for the New West Snoblog.

Friday Shorts

Congrats
Go to Rich Louv for winning the Audubon Medal.

A San Diego colleague of Rich's writes about it.

Wired Culture
These have apparently been around for a year now, but I just heard of them. Ipod vending machines in airports. One report I read told of how Ipods had become "tranquilizers" for a crazy world, especially at a chaotic airport. I love music, but ugghh, I'll take a sunset and some crisp fall breezes any day over tunes at the airport. But this where this culture is...

Nordic Fun
I grew up cross country skiing and learned to really appreciate nordic areas. they would groom trails and have neat trail networks to make the whole day an adventure. Cheap too, the costs are far less than downhill areas. Viking Nordic Ski Center in Vermont was one place we would go to. Check it out. They have done much to make nordic skiing appealing to kids, which is a tough nut to crack when big downhill areas are nearby. They have gotten a couple of feet of snow up that way the past few weeks.

First Snow Misc.

Driving overe the Blue Ridge last night I saw the lights on at Whitetail Ski Area and I knew that winter was coming. Then today we got the first snowstorm of the winter here in the Shenandoah Valley and northern Blue Ridge, one of those Alberta Clippers. Nothing like what hit New England a few days ago, but enough to close the schools and strain the limited number of snowplows in this neck of the woods.

We've had a link on the site for some time to the Greater Cincinnati’s Leave No Child Inside site. There's another site in Ohio-- Leave No Child INSIDE Central Ohio Collaborative, check it out here. Lots of good stuff coming from Ohio.

Lost Ski Areas

When we were kids we were outside, fishing, making forts, doing a lot of things today's kids just don't do. In the winter, we were out on the hills near our house, making ski jumps and naming the runs we would track through the woods. When we were lucky, we would get out skiing at a real ski area. Places like Round Top, Magic Mountain, Stowe, Bromley, Mohawk Mountain, Brodie, Jiminy Peak,Satan's Kingdom, Glen Ellen, Okemo and Snow Valley.

Like the woods of our youth, many of these areas are no more. In New England alone, 548 ski areas have gone away over the years.

What area did you go to that is no longer there? Check them out at the fantastic New England Lost Ski Area Project site.

Ramblings on Skiing

The past few days it has finally started to smell like and feel like Fall in the Virginia Piedmont. Not a moment to soon, after our long drought and unyielding hot weather. With Fall comes thoughts of the winter, and since I was a kid, that means skiing. The gear is pulled out, bases prepared and edges sharpened, and the first pilgrimage to the local ski shop to see what is new.

Skiing was a big deal for me when I was a kid, and it has continued to be a favored activity, including working the business for four years. The interest continued with my daughter, who started to ski at five, and loves skiing today as a high schooler. This is in a place where snow is scarce and only through the skill of men with snow guns can we even get some turns in. They really do get the snow out. Only problem is it's all downhill around here, as nordic skiing needs the natural snow, only available in a reliable fashion 3 hours west of here.

Skiing has seen a huge decrease in participation in the past couple of decades, 23 percent drop by one report I've read. This has been somewhat offset by a huge increase in snowboarding, which is keeping folks, mostly kids, on the slopes in pretty large numbers.

I plan on connecting with the mountains, with my daughter, as soon as we can, and thinking snow is the first step to accomplishing that.