The start-stop ski season cycle, the rhythm of our lives, seems as predictable as the start-stop cycle on Symphony chair proved to be unpredictable. Start sometime in the fall; stop when the World Ski and Snowboard Festival ends, the snow runs out, biking muscles take over from skiing muscles, waxing becomes more alchemical than mechanical, interest just fades away.
So why does this season’s end seem more abrupt?
Let’s not parse reality here. I know skiing’s not over. I went skiing yesterday; I’ll go again today. But the ski season is most definitely over. It’s time now, as the congregation leaves the church, for the choir to sing, sing for the pure pleasure of hearing our own voice. Hallelujah.
There is something remarkably soothing about spring skiing. It’s a quality not shared by the desperate, early days of the season, the dark days of January, the powder of February or the spring-break crowds of March and April. Spring skiing demands late, lazy starts except on those rare occasions when a rogue storm drops a foot or two of fresh on the frozen corn. There’s time for a rollover snooze, an extra cup of coffee, even a run with the dog before waxing up — necessary but impossible — heading up and searching out the best run of the moment, a never-ending game of hide-and-seek that changes run-by-run as the sun and freezing levels cream ice into the afternoon’s inevitable schmoo.
Someone asked last week where the best skiing on the mountain would be the next day. “Sun Bowl?” he asked. “It gets the earliest sun, doesn’t it? West Bowl?”
I started to answer… stopped… started again and finally shrugged my shoulders. “Beats me,” I said, quickly adding since that seemed not to be the kind of answer he was hoping for, “The elusive mystery of spring skiing is finding the best runs at any moment. There is no magic formula. Might be a groomed run; might be off-piste. Might be high; might be low. In the end, it’s a Zen puzzle. As soon as you find the answer, it changes and you have to start searching all over again.”
He left thinking I was crazy.
He was probably right.
But that was last week; this is now. Monday dawned on the end of one season and the start of another. With a three-metre base, Whistler Mountain was closed! Quiet and empty except for the strum of big machines clearing snow off the road up to the Roundhouse where fifty-four million bucks began to be poured into the ground and strung through the air for the amusement ride currently named the Peak to Peak gondola. Long rumoured but fanciful, the gondola between Whistler and Blackcomb is another Olympic reality looming large in our immediate future. Like the Olympics, it’ll change this place forever. Like the Olympics, we all hope the change will be for the better but many of us fear the bad will accompany the good like rain to the top seemed to accompany big dumps so many times this season.
Whether yer fer it or ag’in it, the P2P — this dog really needs a name — will undeniably be a tourist draw. Why wouldn’t it? It’ll set world records for height and freespan; it’ll go from the top of one big mountain to the top of another; hell, there’ll even be a couple of glass-bottom cars to ride so the whiskey jacks can enjoy a little upskirt action.
P2P will be a big summertime draw, the biggest ride this amusement park has to offer, a must-see, must-do spectacle and, of course, a feature on every single televised report during the 2010 Olympics. It’s a can’t-miss winner from almost every angle.
Except skiing.
Symbolically, the P2P is an icon for the seemingly complete metamorphosis of Whistler from ski resort to mountain resort, a transformation long in the making. It’s $54 million bucks that’ll improve skiing and riding on Whistler and Blackcomb not a bit. It won’t open up any new terrain, it won’t lift-access new runs, it won’t disperse crowds.
It will let a few people change mountains more easily — though why they’d want to do that during the day remains a mystery — and it may prove an easier commute for last ride than the alternatives. But the real attraction of the P2P lies in non-skiers.
For skiers, it’s not money well spent and unless a miracle happens, it will inevitably lead to higher lift ticket prices and higher season pass prices. I know it’s not being sold that way but we’re still in the courtship part of the relationship, not the waking up with each other and hangover morning breath part. I’m not privy to the economic model for P2P and neither are you. But noodling around with figures like 4,100 people per hour capacity, number of operating hours in a day, days in a year, likely operating costs and illustrative ticket prices announced last week, I can’t make the payback work as a stand-alone, rider-pay amusement. Time will tell.
And that’s not an indictment of the project. Just a commentary on the passing from one reality into another. Kind of like this paragraph. It leads from one discussion into another.
That discussion is this time of year’s inevitable question: What kind of season was it?
It was a blessed season. The kind of season when even an atheist begins to wonder about the hand of God. A season that started with a bang and a dump and just kept dumping through the rest of November. Ever the skeptic, I could be heard to say, repeatedly, “Yeah, this is great… but it still isn’t as good a start as 1994.” Which was true.
Until December rolled around and it just kept dumping. “Finally,” I thought, “Finally we’re getting some value out of our contract with Coastal to clear the driveway.” By Christmas, we were wondering where we were going to put all the snow. The streets of Alpine were reduced to cow trails and we’d already logged more incredible powder days than we generally get in a whole season, capped by a waist-deep dive through Arthur’s Choice on Christmas morning.
It really didn’t matter what happened after that. We took the good along with the bad. There were enough high-rain days to make the threat of global warming seem as real as the science says it is. There were enough sunny days after the rain to make even a sun worshipper curse the damn orb and pray for snow. There was enough snow to answer the prayers. There were enough tourists to make most of the shopkeepers happy, the restaurateurs busy and everyone feeling way better about the future than they did this time last year.
Rate it a 9.1 and put it to bed. It’s time to go spring skiing on Blackcomb, something none of us has done for several years now.
