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I'm a tolerant guy ... make that a pretty tolerant guy. No, really. You can be both tolerant and judgmental simultaneously.
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I'm a tolerant guy ... make that a pretty tolerant guy. No, really. You can be both tolerant and judgmental simultaneously. Just because I believe, for example, spending $3 million dollars on public toilets is wrong doesn't mean I'll break out the torches and pitchforks when the Resort Municipality of Whistler eventually does it anyway. As is usually the case, I'll tolerate its flawed judgement.

Unlike many less tolerant people I know, when I hear about someone having an unfortunate collision on the mountain I don't immediately ask, "Did the snowboarder stop?" Being a tolerant guy and wanting to believe the best of people, I presume he or she did. Just kidding. I'm tolerant enough that I wait to be told it was a snowboarder who collided with whomever. Actually, I'm so tolerant, I often ask whether it was a snowboarder or a skier who was to blame.

My tolerance may be borne out of the fact the only time I've been hit on the mountain by a moving human it was by another skier ... and I was standing still at the time! Yup, never made contact with a snowboarder in nearly 25 years of skiing here. Never. Having said that, I tend to give snowboarders more room than I give skiers for the same reason I give vision-impaired people more room on sidewalks and in store aisles. Snowboarders have their blind side. Possibly two. I never try to pass on their blind side. Unless I notice they have rear view mirrors attached to their helmets, something I think should be mandatory. I try not to pass on the side where they can ostensibly see as well, possibly because looking and seeing are two different things and both are different from perceiving. I've noticed a marked rise in the lack of perception on the part of snow sliders of both solitudes.

So I wasn't sure how to reply to a recent plea for help from a reader who reminisced—"complained" being perhaps too harsh a word—about narrow misses with "totally oblivious" snowboarders riding their tails down the runs and went on to reminisce about how snowboarders like to pretend they're snowplows and scrape all the snow off runs. I believe the request was for me to tell snowboarders not to do that. So, as a public service I will, notwithstanding the fact doing so reminds me uncomfortably of the times I've tried to teach cats to do tricks.

All you snowboarders: Stop it! Stop scraping all the loose snow off runs. That ought to do the trick.

I know. Not all snowboarders pretend they're snowplows. Some gracefully carve turns, leaving snow intact but for a surgically precise slice. The exception proves the rule. And, of course, many skiers, not just those employing the beginner snowplow technique, move their fair share of snow from one place to the other, eventually creating moguls that, I'm told, snowboarders aren't particularly fond of. None of us are perfect, are we?

But February being a snow-challenged month here in Tiny Town, it's important for all of us to be cautious about unnecessary snow movage. This became apparent to me last Friday when we got what is shaping up to be our entire monthly allotment of fresh snow. I witnessed a lot of snowboarders scraping snow willy-nilly. I also noticed quite a few skiers doing the same, many utilizing their whole body, presumably because they could move more snow sliding downhill in a prone position, often backwards, than they could standing unsteadily on two skinny boards.

The main reason it's important to not scrape snow off the runs is because of what's underneath the snow: ice. And plenty of it. Having used up our annual quota of global warming last summer, we are regressing to the mathematical mean, temperature-wise, by suffering through what many Canadians would consider a mild winter but what we Left Coasters think of as Extreme Cold. Arctic. How cold, you ask? Cold enough they've had to heat the ice room at the Bearfoot Bistro to keep the vodka from freezing. Perhaps I exaggerate. But you understand. Very Cold.

The combination of more fresh snow than expected last Friday and the extraordinary number of people who conflate a one-day holiday with their desire for a whole week off, thus creating Family Week and President's Week out of Family Day and President's Day, got me thinking about the many and various things that test my tolerance on the slopes. (As an aside, people who use the word "conflate," when they really mean "confuse" and thus prove their confusion, test my tolerance too. But I digress.)

I like to think of myself as a reasonably safe skier. I tend to ski a predictable line, generally near the edge of runs and ski within what I consider control. It's not my fault if Whistler's yellow vests—the safety people—disagree and boorishly yell at me as I ski past them. They see the world through their lens; I see it through mine.

But last week, with fresh snow and far too many people squeezing the final days out of their day-week holidays, I nearly collided with people, twice. Neither time with someone on a snowboard. Both times with skiers. Both times with wee skiers—kids. Kamikaze Kids. Kids who haven't learned, or haven't been taught by the adults following them, what a bad idea it is to vector half way across a run to get to the edge where something has attracted their attention but is also being skied by an adult who outweighs them by more than 45 kilograms and isn't expecting them to ski directly into their predictable path of descent.

Parents: Don't let your kids do that. It's a collision they're not going to come out on top of.

One of them, cute as he or she was, assumed a racer's pose, crouched with poles sticking out akimbo behind. Here's another helpful hint. Unless you're a real racer with real racing poles, the bent ones, what you actually look like in that position is a scared porcupine. Think about it.

Now, before all you parents bristle, let me say I don't necessarily blame you. Oh, clearly it's in your interest to teach your children not to obliviously—after all, they're just kids—put themselves in harm's way, but if the kids have spent any time in ski school, I suspect they picked the habit up there. Or is it just me who marvels at the phenomenon of ski-school groups, adults and children alike, sweeping busy runs from side to side as though they were closed courses? Oh, you've noticed it too? Weird, eh?

While all days skiing are good days, the best days are the ones when you come home directly from the mountain ... not the clinic. So stop scraping snow off the runs and ski/board as though there are people other than you sharing them.