Dec. 31, 2007
The explosion was perfectly timed to coincide with my first attempt to ignite the confounding gas wall heater in my brother’s condo at the base of Angel Fire ski resort. Celebratory fireworks — as it turned out — freaked out Zippy the Dog. Zippy went nuts, running around, barking, making his unique contribution to the overall sense of chaos. I levitated, imagining the entire complex about to go up in a natural gas fireball. Somebody dropped something heavy on the landing behind me. Armageddon seemed just around the corner.
Happy New Year.
An inauspicious start to the Ski la Vie tour? Perhaps. Are we having fun yet?
Of course we are. Or, at least, we will be. Skiing’s all about fun. Unless you make part of your living writing about skiing. If you do, skiing’s also about celebrity, fashion, newest and biggest, lifestyles of the rich and fatuous, resort experience, overpriced restaurants and overamped clubs, seeing and being seen, PR and BS. BS and noise and all the distractions that blur the essence of the addiction: sliding down snowy mountains for the sheer pleasure of sliding down snowy mountains.
Skiing’s about freedom. Skiing’s about that ironic interplay of gravity and weightlessness that lets us slip effortlessly downhill. Skiing’s about friends and family having a wonderful time despite the nattering a ski day entails. Skiing’s about the warm glow of tired muscles at après. Skiing’s about pushing your personal envelope whether that envelope consists of green runs or double black diamonds. Skiing’s about plumbers and CEOs melting into the same hot tub, swapping stories about the fantastic runs they skied earlier in the day.
The plan was simple. Spend the month of January skiing at some of the best places in the U.S. from New Mexico to Washington state. Write about the skiing. Write only about the skiing. Forget the dining, the nightlife, the politics, the Adventure Zones, the distractions. Distill the experience to its essence: skiing.
Ski to live. Live to ski. Ski la Vie.
Jan. 1, 2008
With 550 in-bounds acres and 2,000 vertical feet, Angel Fire isn’t what you generally think of as a destination ski resort. Don’t tell that to the people who drove from Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, South Carolina and Illinois to ski here.
Texas I can understand. Angel Fire is the closest resort to the Lone Star state that has that most coveted of amenities — base-area lodging in the form of family-friendly condos. Judging from the sacks of groceries, numerous coolers, full-size gas barbecues and, if I’m not mistaken, sides of beef the Texans seem to be unpacking from their enormous SUVs, quite a few pulling trailers, many are here for the season… or at least a long weekend.
The skiing, this first day of 2008, was the kind of skiing only a diehard addict can appreciate. The snow was too little and too old, the chips of rock were unavoidable, the bumps were icy, the day was frigid. That didn’t stop anyone from having a good time. The spirit on the mountain on New Year’s Day was high, if subdued by a malaise borne of the morning after the night before. But the Texans warmed to the day. Whether it was the handful of them tentatively picking their way down the black diamond moguls, enthusiastic clusters of friends thrilling themselves on the intermediate slopes, or the patio full of refueling parents awaiting their ski-schooled children at day’s end, all seemed to be livin’ the dream.
And why not? The sun was shining, lift lines were non-existent, the distinctive aroma of green chile cheeseburgers drifted out from every eatery on the mountain and the skiing, whether easy or hard, skilled or struggling, was way more interesting than watching football. Okay, that’s just my opinion; the Texans were conflicted.
Jan. 2, 2008
If I didn’t live in Whistler, I’d probably live in Taos. Taos is the kind of ski hill Whistler would be if it were still family owned, if Blackcomb had never been developed, if Peak, Harmony and Symphony chairs had never been installed and if nobody had ever had the questionable idea of bidding for the Olympics. Taos is a time machine and the time is the 1970s.
The lifts are slow, the runs are steep, the grooming is immaculate and the hike-to lines — the ones Taos earned its rep for — aren’t choked with gomers who don’t belong there. On-mountain dining is largely run by independents; as a result, the food doesn’t all taste like it came from the same commissary and ranges from the sublime beef or salmon burgers on the sunny deck of Jean Mayer’s St. Bernard, to exquisite, incapacitating meals of gustatory delight at The Bavarian.
The buzz at Taos isn’t about the skiing though. It isn’t about the snowstorm expected 48 hours from now. It’s about snowboards and snowboarders. On Mar. 19, Taos changes forever. Dropping out of the unholy trinity, leaving only Alta and Deer Valley to continue their narrow-minded discrimination against single-plankers, Taos opens to, and warmly embraces, snowboarders for the first time. Even the diehard skiers know their continued enjoyment of this most uncharacteristic resort depends on more warm bodies hurtling down the icy cold slopes. Those bodies are likely to be riding snowboards.
If boarding is your passion, there’s a whole old-new place for you to check out next year. Oh, lucky you.
Jan. 4, 2008
Reprising Taos for half a day and a final green chile cheeseburger, driving another half to Durango, I was dismayed to discover it too had succumbed to the plague of the modernity. What was, only 20 years ago, a sleepy, picturesque old mining town is now a self-storage, suburban sprawl with as much appeal as your average big-box extravaganza.
Despite this mega-growth, Purgatory ski area — about 30 minutes north — seems to have hardly changed at all. There is still almost no base area lodging, though much seems to be under construction. There is still virtually no place to get a decent meal without driving. And judging from ambience best described as arrested decay, I’d be willing to bet the gum I stuck under a table at après hot-spot Purgy’s 20 years ago is still there.
But $100 million bucks — assuming the whole effort doesn’t get washed away in the growing credit crisis just beginning to make itself felt in the US — worth of base area construction ought to change the face of Purgatory substantially in the next few years. It’s unlikely to change the nature of the skiing though.
Purgatory is another of those family-friendly mountains where skiers and boarders can slide and frolic and probably go home with all their joints still functioning. Nearly three-quarters of its runs are green and blue and many of its blacks are designed more to boost self-esteem than to test skill. But its 1,200 acres are spread over a considerable horizontal expanse and temptations abound if you know where to look. Bumps, trees and at least one top-to-bottom, ungroomed terrain park await the diligent… or the lucky.
Jan. 5, 2008
The drive back to Durango was a white-knuckle, whiteout snowstorm. The highway closed behind me as I headed north to Telluride. The storm that dropped 11 feet of snow in California’s Sierras pummeled this part of Colorado and we barely made it into the genteel confines of The Mountain Lodge at Telluride before the Highway Patrol pulled everyone off the road.
With a couple of inches of snow falling each hour, time was a-wastin’. I grabbed my gear, slid down to one of the Telluride’s base areas, found my tickets and asked for the quickest way to the top. Locals call Sunshine chair Two-Mile lift. It seems longer. The quad glides over a string of mansions — most devoid of life but nonetheless cleared of snow, warmed and lighted — so outrageous in size and design they look more like boutique hotels, and run $20 million and up… way up. There’s a joke about Telluride’s millionaires having been run out of Aspen by that town’s billionaires. Whatever the relative wealth, clearly these are retreats of those for whom money has ceased to have any real meaning, a toast to wretched excess.
With snow falling, visibility limited and absolutely no knowledge of the mountain’s terrain, I did the only thing that made sense and headed for Gold Hill, the highest lift, and latched onto a couple of locals who knew the mountain well enough to ski it blind. After hasty introductions on the chair, Pete and Craig were happy to drag me around the best terrain on the mountain and, in the course of five or six quick laps on unnamed lines, proved Telluride was a skier’s mountain worth bragging about. From a wind-swept top, the terrain dropped quickly into tight trees, skirted well-marked cliffs, plunged down steep-sided, half-pipe gullies and emerged into open rollers leading back to the lift. They killed me in a single afternoon while the snow kept falling.
Just as well. The next day dawned with snow still falling and absolutely no chance to ski the top of the mountain again. With so much new, heavy snow — Whistler powder — the day’s action was limited to the predominance of black runs off chairs 8 and 9. The rest of the mountain just wasn’t steep enough to cope with the volume and density of snow. Unfortunately, lifts 8 and 9 weren’t able to cope with the volume and density of eager skiers waiting to ride them. Pity, that.
Jan. 7, 2008
An avalanche that left somewhere in the neighbourhood of 20 feet of snow along 300 metres of highway made getting in or out of Silverton impossible. I don’t know what it feels like to be stuck in a place like Silverton with no way out and nothing to do but ski but I imagine it feels better than being caught on the wrong side of the slide. Carumba!
Jan. 8, 2008
Monarch Mountain’s trail map says, “Talk to a Friendly Local.” So I did. And they were. Of course, it’s easy to be friendly when the snow is as light as snow gets and as deep as most people can handle without a snorkel. And there’s a lot of time to talk when the lifts are elderly, pokey fixed-grip chairs and there is no deafening snowmaking equipment anywhere in sight, and no one’s stressed out about skiing the fresh before it gets shredded. It doesn’t get shredded at Monarch. Snow this light just kind of gets moved around and skied through again, like wake closing behind your windsurfer.
Straddling the Continental Divide, Monarch seems barely on Colorado skiers’ radar. That’s okay with the friendly locals, all of whom live at least half an hour from the lodging-free ski hill. “More powder, fewer poseurs,” says Doc Ed, a 72-year-old who was friendly enough to lead me through his favourite stand of trees, Christmas Trees.
“We have a pitch named Christmas Trees where I live,” I said.
“Where’s that?” asked Doc.
“Whistler, B.C.”
“Never heard of it,” he replied.
I think he might have been pulling my leg. But it’s hard to tell with friendly locals.
Jan. 10, 2008
I’m sure someday I’ll appreciate the bazillion dollars being lavished on the Sea-to-Sky highway. Or maybe not. Either way, two things convince me the money could have been better spent elsewhere in the province. First are the stories about the mountain roads to the alpine events in Torino, paths that, by all accounts, make Highway 99 feel like a turnpike. Second is the horrifying drive along I-70 from Denver to Keystone, A-Basin, Breckenridge, Copper, Vail, et. al. Anyone who has had the misfortune of driving either side of the Eisenhower tunnel on a snowy day with Loveland Pass closed would rather crawl the distance of Vancouver to Whistler on his knees… through shards of glass.
I drove it twice, for reasons too painful to explain. I hope to never drive it again.
It put me in a foul mood when I finally reached Keystone. My mood didn’t get much brighter when I discovered most of the parking lots were pay parking. My guide being a no-show added to my growing funk. Being shanghaied by a mountain host who was all talk and no ski was just the capper to a perfect morning.
Had Brad Russer, a friend who patrols at Keystone, bailed on me as well, I’d never have gotten to see the good side of the mountain. I’d seen the immaculately-groomed, crowded side of the mountain: Dercum mountain to be exact. I’d seen the very crowded backside and the less crowded bumpy black runs off Santiago Express.
But damned if I know what I saw once I started following Brad. “This run have a name?” I’d ask repeatedly.
“Uh… no,” came the answer.
I was beginning to suspect Brad was part dog. The only time we emerged from heavily-treed runs with no names was when he said, “If we hurry, we can catch the last cat up.” Keystone runs a five-dollar cat from the top of Outback Express to Wapiti Peak, saving those not used to 12,000-plus feet of elevation a lung-searing, head-spinning, mile-long hike.
Drawing heavily on local knowledge, we watched the rest of the overcrowded cat crew head down the open lines of South Bowl before we headed for — what else? — trees that skirted Keystone’s western boundary… trees that eventually brought us back to the chair… more trees that meandered down to Ruby Express… and still more trees that finally spit us out at the base of the mountain.
Keystone’s rep was saved by a friend who was clearly part dog.
Jan. 11, 2008
My mama always said, “If you can’t say anything nice about someone, don’t say anything at all.”
I skied Breckenridge on Jan. 11 th . I’ll leave it at that.
Jan. 12, 2008
Having spent the night at her house — after pleading to save me from having to drive I-70 again — I met up with Maja Russer for a sunny Saturday ski at Copper Mountain. Maja is Brad’s wife and gives no indication of being part dog. That’s a good thing because, while there are trees, Copper is mostly about bowl skiing.
I’d been missing bowl skiing. Not that there weren’t bowls other places I’d been skiing. But Copper was the first mountain that had open bowls… treeless bowls… bowls with almost infinite lines and room to be expansive. The sunshine didn’t hurt either.
What hurt was the rocks. I didn’t see any of the rocks I hit but my skies seemed to be drawn to them like magnets to lodestone. It was as though I was trapped in a slapstick vaudeville routine.
“You always fall this much?” Maja, who skis with the grace of a former racer, asked.
“I’m not so much fallin’ as I’m getting knocked over,” I replied, as though the distinction mattered.
I fell through Copper Bowl, Union Bowl, Resolution Bowl and finally managed to stay upright through Spaulding Bowl, the day’s minor achievement aside from running into — figuratively — former Whistlerite David Barry, slumming it at Copper instead of field testing the product at CMH, his current heli-bailiwick.
Just to prove she and Brad were as happy a couple as I suspected they were, Maja drove me into Enchanted Forest for the last run of the day. There are three gladed runs through Lower Enchanted Forest.We didn’t take any of them. We took something I came to call Virtual Run. The trick to skiing trees is to focus on the spaces, not the trees.There’s nothing to focus on in Virtual Run. Maja slipped through the trees like water seeping through a hairline crack in a glass. I barked after her. There weren’t any rocks for me to hit. There didn’t need to be… the trees were more than adequate stand-ins.
Jan. 13, 2008
I almost didn’t ski at Vail. The Marriott couldn’t find my reservation. I was tired and cranky after hitting rocks at Copper all day and whatever brains I had left couldn’t cope with the information that I was reservationless.
The only saving grace in an otherwise graceless situation was the opulence of the Presidential Suite when the reservation — in my Perfect Partner’s name — was finally found. Hail to the Chief, dude.
The suite made me feel adequately Vail-ized, though I had an overwhelming desire to wear either fur or a cowboy hat. Neither would have been appropriate in the deep powder dished up by the mountain’s expansive back bowls.
Vail seems huge. It goes on forever. It’s all open, all skiable, and all confusing as hell. I’m always lost at Vail and, frankly, I don’t care. See a line, ski it. That pretty much sums up Vail’s bowls. You have to go way out of your way to be in over your head at Vail. The only ‘real’ black runs are some lines skirting a cliff band back in Blue Sky Basin. The other black runs are poseurs in fur jackets and cowboy hats. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The front side, by the way, is just for commuting. It’s better than I-70 for that purpose but the traffic’s just as bad. The extensive art on display all over the village can generate a bad case of art-envy in a Whistler guy though.
Jan. 15, 2008
I was pissed off and depressed by the time I rolled into Aspen. Pissed off because my week’s worth of lodging at Park City had been ungraciously rescinded and, with the Sundance Film Festival scheduled for the same time, nothing could be scared up to replace it despite the best efforts of many PR people. I had to make the decision to pull the plug on that week and face the inevitable cascade effect on the downstream lodging I’d meticulously arranged.
I was depressed because I’d just gotten word the always fabulous Crystal Palace was into its last season. Having been an Aspen feature — the Aspen feature — for over 50 years, the venerable dinner theatre, specializing in political and social satire, is closing after its final show Apr. 12.
Unlike many shops and restaurants operating on abbreviated schedules, the Crystal Palace wasn’t closing for lack of staff or lack of patrons. Mead Metcalf, well into his seventies, is just ready to retire and take it easy. While its loss won’t destroy the social fabric of Aspen’s cultural scene, it’s an entertainment not likely to be seen again.
With the Christmas rush over and the beautiful people dispersed to the other beautiful places in the world, Aspen in mid January belonged to skiers. The snow was plentiful, the slopes were uncrowded, and the overall impact was one of tenuous prosperity.
Despite the efforts Aspen — and Vail — have put into employee housing, both resorts are suffering from a chronic lack of workerbees. Many shops and restaurants are on short hours, owners are grousing about packing it in, building continues apace and the whole scene seems to play out, in microcosm, the larger, crumbling US economy’s house of cards.
Jan. 19, 2008
As expected, the consequences of losing Park City was a shortened tour with a final stop at Mt. Bachelor in Oregon. With no base lodging, I was booked 20 minutes away at Sunriver Resort, a sprawling summertime enclave of easy living.
Twenty miles west of Bend, Bachelor is a regional ski hill that doesn’t get the respect it deserves. There’s nothing wrong with its numbers: 3,365 feet of vertical, 3,683 acres of terrain, an average base between 150 and 200 inches, a 360 degree alpine experience around its volcanic peak, acres of no-name glades.
Wind is Bachelor’s Achilles’ heel and the morning wasn’t too far along before wind halted the Summit Express for the day.
Skiing at Bachelor is as straightforward as a mountain can be. Everything is downhill, fall-line from the top. Subtlety and nuance play no part; such is the beauty of skiing a volcanic cone. Treeline runs out about two-thirds of the way up and the Summit Express chair takes it from there to 9,065 feet, top o’ the world. The panorama from the summit is limitless with high pine desert stretching to the east and the sweep of the Cascade Volcanic Arc painting the horizon. Whatcha see is whatcha ski from here; it pretty much all follows a blackish pitch and plunges into your choice: trees or runs. Trees, while less forgiving, are also less crowded.
Jan. 22, 2008
Home, sweet home. After innumerable emails of the “Nyah, nyah, nyah, it’s snowing like crazy in Whistler,” coming back to familiar terrain was as comfortable as sleeping in my own bed.
There’s a lot to be said for road trips. There’s maybe more to be said for coming home.
Ski la Vie.
Editor’s Note: In addition to taking a ski vacation away from Whistler, G.D. Maxwell also took a vacation from the metric system. As Maxwell put it, you start changing feet to metres and you instantly lose more than two thirds of your elevation.
One inch = 2.54 centimetres
One foot = 0.3 metres
One mile = 1.61 kilometres
One acre = 0.4 hectares
