The Skiing Post

It's been two weeks since I got back to Vancouver. As Keanu would say, "whoa." Time flies when you are bunking in with your parents. Let me seperate the times into seperate posts. That way I can be verbose without actually seeming to be too very very verbose. You know?

Last weekend we did the annual family hole-up at Whistler, usually practised over Thanksgiving, but delayed for my sake this year. Drinks were drunk, board games were played and the eating was rich, sweet, fatty and non-stop. The mountains were open for skiing too, so I got to test out my weak little spaghetti legs (I went for a grand total of 4 runs the whole time I was in LA- that's one a month, to the day!) on the slopes for the first time in two years. The first day was pretty good, depsite the dearth of snow. It was a lot like spring skiing, actually, complete with rain down in the village. My legs held up pretty well and my new parabolic skies kept me from looking like too much of an idiot. I have to say, that for a couple of people on the north side of 55, my parents are damn fine skiers. Very in control, which is more than can be said for other members of the family (I spent much of the day trying not to cut off my mom as she made her measured turns down the hill).

On the second day, I went up with my brother Steve. He's a very good skier, so I was looking forward to the day for the speed, the fun, and the learning that comes with skiing with someone better than you. On the chair on way up the top half of the mountain we began to notice that a fair number of snowboarders were downloading their way off the mountain. One of them howled "beware the iccccccce" at us as his chair passed ours. Sure enough, we stopped chatting and listened to the skiing going on below us and all that we could hear was "scraaaaape. scraaaaape." Yikes. Turns out it had rained all the way up the top that night and then cold cold winds blew over it, scouring off any last remants of snow, a la praire dust bowl. Steve's girlfriend Sarah, who works on the mountain, and a ski patrol guy both said to us that the conditions of the day were the worst they had seen in ten years. They also said that this is what skiing back east is like. It was like skiing down the inside of a crusted over freezer.

About halfway through the day, as we were battling our way down another slick slope, hoping there were some scraps of snow on the bottom to stop on, it occured to me that if I fell going this fast on this kind of surface it would more or less be akin to being tossed out of a moving car onto cement. A steep cement hill, to be precise.

But no, no one died, at least no one I know (ski patrol guy said there were a lot of broken wrists that day) although Steve almost dropped a pole over some hostile-looking open creek bed.

Uh, skiing is so fun. So, so fun. Even in crap conditions. Dear Mom and Dad, thanks for teaching me to ski when I was small. I no longer feel stuck and start to cry at the top of steep hills.