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As if on cue, the sunshine ignored the forecast — flurries — and made the mountains shine in their grand, ski season 2007-08 finale. Timing is everything and this timing was perfect. Well, nearly perfect.
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As if on cue, the sunshine ignored the forecast — flurries — and made the mountains shine in their grand, ski season 2007-08 finale. Timing is everything and this timing was perfect. Well, nearly perfect.

The village was full of happy burnout cases, refugees from 10 days of WSSF festivities, who’d enjoyed too little sleep, too much merriment and way, way too many euphoria-inducing substances and experiences. Still, they soldiered on. After all, a finale is a finale, and the last person standing wins.

The only thing missing from the scene was HEAT. Who turned the sun down? Where’s the friggin’ heat? Oh global warming, where art thou?

Spring skiing isn’t really spring skiing if the temperatures are so cold, so January, so bone-chilling frigid they skid into the Zone of Extreme Discomfort, the point at which most locals shrug off skiing for more genteel pursuits best pursued indoors. “Only tourists and ski instructors are up there today,” said one crusty old-timer on Saturday when the pre-windchill temp on the mountains was down around -16°C. “And not too many ski instructors,” piped in a ski instructor who happened to be within earshot.

It is a truism that spring skiing requires springlike conditions, which is to say snow exhibiting the thermolabilic qualities of a slowly melting frozen margarita. Spring skiing is a leisurely dance performed at a quick tempo. It requires thoughtful analysis, insightful timing, geographic precision and an understanding — memory — of what happened yesterday and overnight to be executed with any hope of success.

Spring skiing can be a nightmare or a dream, depending on how well you augur the signs. Show up too early or on the wrong aspect of the mountain and the whole experience tumbles toward horror show. Show up too late and you miss the metamorphosis that makes spring skiing unique, that downhill slide on snow morphing from ice crystal, to light cream, to corn, to schmoo, to oh-mama-get-me-outta-here glop.

It’s a combination of the fickle nature of spring skiing — the best insight and planning can be completely derailed by just a few too few degrees of heat — and Winter Fatigue that drives normally sane skiers to start swinging golf clubs when they should be concocting essential spring wax, that alchemical combination of waxes and luck that’ll keep their boards floating instead of sticking. They can be forgiven. It happens to all of us sooner or later; some years just take a bigger toll.

This was one of those years for me. For the first time in, I honestly can’t remember how long, I’m being bushwhacked by fantasies of lying on a warm beach, watching the movies roll past the inside of my eyelids, snapping my fingers for another chilled rum drink, and doing nothing so much as baking my entire body from the outside in. I won’t succumb to the fantasy. I know I’ll get bored and fidgety after 10 minutes of lying inert in a pool of my own sweat. I know 10 minutes after that I’ll be soaring through fantasies of perfect spring skiing. And I know in 10 more minutes, I’ll be checking my return ticket and counting the days until I line up, cattlelike, to get back to the cool mountain air.

Still….

Patiently awaiting the heat we like to think generally accompanies sunshine, it’s a great time to ponder the perennial question: What kind of ski season was it?

I know, Blackcomb’s still open… sort of. But ski season ended earlier this week, preempted by the unfathomable need to get busy on the Peak-to-Peak amusement ride. 200+ centimetres of snow on Whistler Mountain lies untouched by skis, waiting only to become water, conjuring up memories of the bad old days of the early years after the merger when it closed first and we had to learn where things were on Blackcomb. It’s not a pretty sight, whether you understand the Big Ride or not.

Compliments of climate change, this year was another boffo hit, at least on the slopes. Now that we don’t get regular updates on skier visits and other barometers of success, I can only rely on anecdotal evidence to gage the economic climate, which is universally positive. The restaurateurs, retailers and hoteliers I’ve asked claim it was a good season, businesswise. Why would they lie to me?

There is at least one computer model of climate change that predicts cooler and wetter weather for this part of the world. If it’s accurate, the good times will last until they’re over, as Yogi Berra might say. Cooler and wetter bodes well for ski season if not for the summer that follows. I’m pretty sure it’s memories of last summer, the summer that wasn’t, that are probably fueling that lying on the beach fantasy.

But in a world of global warming, this is about as good as it can get for a skier. There was marvelous skiing by November’s end, great skiing throughout December with only one of those regrettable incidents best left unspoken. And I can only infer, from all those nyah, nyah, nyah e-mails I got from “friends” while I was traveling in Colorado, January pretty much defined the word epic… again. After that, we more or less drifted into good-to-great status and if it never gets any better than that, we have nothing to complain about.

Call it a solid 8 out of 10, with a bullet.

For me, it was both better and worse than that. Traveling to all those U.S. resorts left me with one overwhelming impression: This is one incredible ski town.

If we’d never sunk one dollar of the $500 million the IOC blackmailed us into spending on the Sea-to-Sky highway, we’d still have it way better than those poor suckers risking their lives on I-70 from Denver to anywhere west and back again at the end of the day or weekend. And once arrived, none of those resorts have anywhere near the dynamic feel Whistler has, that indescribable sense of village that comes from simply having people mill about on foot instead of sitting in a traffic jam in their SUV. They may drip with money, but they have soul of, well, a melted margarita.

That feeling of soullessness was brought into even finer focus when I traveled to eastern British Columbia and spent time at Revelstoke, Fernie, Whitewater and other spots on the Powder Highway. Those places have character. They also have great skiing. Compared to them, the Colorado resorts aren’t so much Disneyland as they are McDonald’s. Filling but ultimately devoid of character.

They are a great argument for Whistler dropping this whole fatuous Whistler Standard nonsense and drilling down to exactly what it is that makes us special… as opposed to rendering us just another Big Mac. It isn’t too late to find out.