College

With my parents retiring, selling their house, and moving to North Carolina, it was up to me to clean out my old closet. Between college books, baseball cards, and various useless souvenirs (New York Mets Magazine from that game I went to in 1990 – Howard Johnson on the cover!), I found a cache of photographs from college. There were some pretty sweet shots in there. But first, the background: 

While I loved skiing in high school, 4 years on the ski team, preceded by 5 years in the ski club, had made skiing stale and a little boring. I felt like I had reached the highest levels I could. I had put in over 60 days for each of the previous 5 years, and I spent a lot of time in the freezing cold, shivering in my speed suit, waiting for a race to start. I didn’t want to be on the college ski team, and I didn’t really know how much I wanted to ski at all.

But summer came, and the itch started to develop again. My one request for a college roommate was someone that skied. And that’s how I met Todd (Toddykins, in college).  

 

He was responsible for two things: One, reinvigorating my love for skiing with an unquenchable desire to get out there; and Two, getting me into tele skiing. The first day that Sunday River opened in 1998, we were there. The first day that Sugarloaf opened, we were there. When it snowed 24”, we strapped on our skis and jumped off the cliffs behind the dorms.

When we got bored around campus, we built a semi-successful, but eventually stupid quarterpipe.

For spring break, we didn’t go to Cancun, we went to Fernie, BC.

And we extended the season even further by skiing Tuckerman Ravine in Late April and Early May.

Todd works for a major bank and is now in Singapore (I think), and Andy (the other guy in the photos) is a doctor in Tuscon, AZ. I don’t know if they can’t ski as much as they want or if they just don’t want to ski that much anymore (although, for what it’s worth, Todd says that his 10 days of heli skiing a year are worth an entire season of East Coast skiing). But I do know that for a few years in college, I was more psyched on skiing that I had ever been before.

Sometimes it takes a little push to get you going again. I’m glad that happened in my late teens/early 20’s. I might not have always made the most economically sound decisions in my life (obviously, I’d be in a much better financial place if I were a banker or doctor), but I still get over 60 days on snow per year. And I know that most of those days will be filled with the same smiles that I had when I was at school in front of our hastily made, shoddily constructed quarterpipe.