The Life

I’ve been thinking a lot about The Life. You know what I’m talking about. When you’re on vacation, you sit back in your beach chair (or your Adirondack chair, or your comfy couch in front of the fireplace), you take a sip of your beer (or margarita, or fruity drink inside a hollowed out coconut), you look out over the ocean (or mountains, or lake) and you say to the people with you: “This is The Life.”

I used the vacation example because I assume that’s where most working people get their most satisfying taste of The Life (you don’t hear a lot of people dropping that quote in their office cubicle). My parents, who are looking forward to retirement next year, have been putting the pieces together for a pretty nice version of what I’m talking about. Since they love to Golf, they bought property in North Carolina and they’re building a house on the 13th hole of a really nice Golf Course. Then, since they love the Adirondacks (but not necessarily the winter), they’ve been making renovations to their lake house to make it a more “permanent” summer residence. I’m sure they’ll finish plenty of days toasting to The Life.

I only bring this up because I read this amusing article on cleansnipe.com (which, incidentally, is a fantastic aggregator of the tramdock, bonktown, chainlove, deal every hour or so websites): The 10 Things You Need to Know about Being a Ski Bum. It seems that being a ski bum is not the most glamorous existence in the world:

Everything is expensive in a ski town: food, drink, gas, rent, entertainment, and all that shiny gear you thought you needed. Debt grows quickly where many jobs are seasonal and don’t pay enough to cushion existence with more than the bare essentials.
To cut costs, ski bums pack into skid cribs that make frat houses look clean. Ski bums camp out over the summer months. Ski bums scrounge food and other essentials. A truly savvy ski bum knows every trick in the book for getting by with minimal dependence on “The System”. Unfortunately, after 40+ years of battling ski bum infestations, mountain town manifestations of “The System” know what it takes to keep things clean and pleasant for the tourists.

 Which is all true. I remember watching an over-the-top, hilarious documentary called Ski Bums about a bunch of guys living in the Whistler area in British Columbia, who mostly prove the second axiom of the aforementioned list (Many “ski bums” don’t ride very much but most can party with the worst of em’). “Crucial” Mike (he thinks his name comes from a “marijuana reference”) was able to “stylize [his] existence” after a spring thaw under-the-chairlift treasure hunt, and Johnny Thrash (a.k.a. “Johnny Two Stroke, Johnny Four Stroke”, etc.) was able to score a pretty sweet set of Salomons from a garbage dump. I don’t want to ruin the movie, but Crucial’s scene at the mid-mountain food court has got to be the emotional climax of the film.

When I imagine The Life, I definitely don’t imagine digging through Garbage Dumps. But I guess I don’t really imagine being a “bum” either. I mean, sure, they’ll be some times of sweet, sweet relaxation. The requisite magazine shot of people chilling outside a snow covered coffee house with the newspaper comes to mind:

 But I have too much energy to just sit around all the time (and I’m becoming increasingly annoyed with reading the paper). The question is what to do to support my existence (I can always stylize it later). I like ski instructing, but I also like to make ski movies. I like doing my blog, but I also like to party (Ommegang Brewery “Ommefest” tomorrow in Cooperstown). With that in mind, I think I have found the perfect job for myself:

[W]e at Canyons want you to come work for us. Not only will we pay you a salary but, we’ll put you up for free – at a suite at the Waldorf Astoria, no less, and give you full VIP treatment including heli-skiing, avalanche training, spa treatments and full gear! Read on to learn how to Apply.
ALL YOU DO:
Blog about your day’s activities 3-4 times a week with photos and video
Attend Canyons events
Participate in monthly Canyons activities
Shadow shifts with various departments: Ski Patrol, Food and Beverage, Lift Operations

Hmmmm . . . Season Pass to the Canyons, $10,000 a month, “head to toe” ski gear, airfare, avalanche training, and heli-skiing. Sign me up!

Snow Drought and Other Stuff . . .

According to Harvey Road, the last time the National Weather Service in Albany posted a Winter Storm for the Adirondacks was December 9th.  His Gore Snowfall total is down more than 5 feet from last year.  According to the NWS, Albany has had only 6 days with more than an inch of snow this winter and is down about 20 inches from last winter.

Depressing, yes, but fear not.  I will always remember the sign at Sugarloaf on one of the lift towers that says that its snowiest months are March, April, and February (in that order).  I'd assume that Gore is similar.  Here's hoping that this winter will be redeemed with a monster Spring.

I would like to call to your attention, though, the difference in "snow droughts" from East to West.  Talking with people in Utah, you would think that it's the end of the world out there.  When I posted the Tahawus Glade Video on my facebook page, a guy I went to college with said that there's more snow in the trees here than there was out there.  Granted, they've gotten a little more snow since then - I thought PowderQueen's TR (also on Harvey Road) looked pretty damn good to me (even she, however, put in a mild complaint - "We didn't get too much deep powder, but we made the best of what we had").  Then I checked the Statistics.  Alta had gotten 162 inches of snow before I posted my video (they're up around 250 now).

Amazing!!!  In my wildest dreams, I could only hope that we'd get 162 inches of snow this year.  Imagine someone complaining!  I know, I know, mountains out there need more snow to operate because they don't have the manicured runs that we have here, but come on!!  If I lived out west, would I become a snow snob too?  Would I look out the window, see a base depth of only 84 inches and go back to sleep?  If the answer is yes (and I think it might be), that just speaks volumes about the difference in skiing from East to West.  We ski here because it's enjoyable, fun to do with friends, and great excercise.  Out there, though, people ski because they SKI.

And that's the difference.  I had a blast on Sagamore last week.  It was great: fresh gun-pow, soft bumps, and good people.  But I stayed on Sagamore for pretty much the entire day.  That was the only place where I could SKI.  I guess it's obvious that I believe that SKIING is different than skiing.  And it seems like this year, I've had a lot more skiing than SKIING.  Don't get me wrong, I've had some great runs, but there hasn't been a day where I've been completely gung ho about pushing myself, exploring, and taking charge of a ski day.  I've mostly been taking it as it comes, finding the good snow, and lapping it until I'm tired.

Come to think of it, I always do a lot of that at the beginning of a season.  When the mountain isn't fully open, the best bet is to find the trail that they've been hammering with guns, and ski it until your legs give out.  The problem is, this year has been like an extended early season.  There's not too much separating skiing now from skiing in December or Early January.  Yeah, there are more trails open, but none that really excite me (especially since they keep grooming the trails that have character).  How many times can I ski groomed frozen granular before I get bored?  Pretty soon, I'm going to want to SKI.  I want to rip bump lines and tree lines, I want to adventure, I want to explore, I want to find a stash that no one has skied for weeks, I want to stare at big mountains, and plan tomorrow's day over a beer (because it will be different than today).  These are the things I love about skiing.  And they're the things that I can't do in an Eastern Powder Drought, but can do in a Western Powder "Drought".       

Waiting

Does anyone find that life is a series of waits?  Everyone seems to be waiting for something: waiting for the weekend, waiting for snow, wating for vacation, waiting for someone to get home so I can start making dinner . . .  Waits can be short term (tomorrow's Friday!) or long term (I wish I had enough equity in my house so that I could sell this sucker and move out west).  But we don't really realize that, while we're sitting around staring at our watches, all sorts of stuff is going on around us.  Life is happening, and it's happening to other people.  Here's something from Skiing in the Shower, one of the blogs I read (listed at the right):

A lot of us thin[k] that once the house is clean, we can sit down and write that story we've always meant to, or once the lawn is mowed, we can spend some time playing with the kids, or once the laundry is done, we can finally read that book that's been gathering dust on the side table.

And that once we make our money, and we have enough in savings, we can do the thing we were meant to do. I don't think that life is meant to be like that. I think that life is passing us by at warp speed. And I think that how you reach for the things you wish for in life, every day, is what living life is about.

Truth.

The author of that blog (Kate Howe) is basically living the dream.  She recently moved to Aspen, works as a ski instructor/massage therapist, and writes articles for several ski publications.  And since she's a skier, she's able to work in sweet skiing analogies:

I think about this when I think of skiing as well... we search for the perfect turn, and sometimes, we hang on to our old turn because we love the safety and security of it so much... we are so sure that the next one will be the good one if we can just hang on to this one long enough and get ready, be totally and completely prepared for that next turn, and by the time we've triple checked everything, we've missed our opportunity, the next turn has come and gone, there's a tree in the way and its time to make a drastic, quick move to avoid catastrophe.

What if, in life, as in skiing, we let each "should have" go as the turn passes us, what if we kept moving into the future, reaching for what was working, and letting the ski glide under our bodies, letting the snow spray, letting the sun hit our faces [. . . ] in the most inopportune moments, because we don't care about the time and place being right, we care more about living[?]

Exactly.  Life shouldn't be about waiting, it should be about . . . ummmm . . . Living.  Maybe it's time to let go of that old turn, turn the page in your life and move on to something else.  What are you waiting for?

 

Love this . . .

The Trailer to this year's TGR movie is so great.  I just love the idea of opening your door in the morning and seeing the most beautiful, majestic mountain peaks.  Hopefully, someday it will become a reality.

Boredom

You know, having every other Monday off is awesome . . . Unless there's nothing to do.  Continued warm weather in the east is making this "skiing" blog awful hard to write.  Sample post: "Instead of skiing today, I raked leaves.  That is all."  Once again, I feel compelled to post a video of how life could be (if I was living in Whistler, BC):





Ugh.

Plans for the future . . .

I go through a struggle in my mind every once in a while and it goes like this:  Every time I think about moving out west [to a ski town (Jackson, Breck, Truckee),or a pseudo-ski town (Bend, Bozeman, Santa Fe) or a ski city (Boulder, Denver, or SLC)], I always say something like, "Well, I'll move out west eventually, but right now, I just refinanced my house, and I should wait a couple of years to rebuild some equity before I make any moves".  Or, "I only have to work for 2 more years until I'm vested in the retirement system at work, so I'll wait until then to move."  I'm okay with this now (those seem to be good reasons), but will it keep going like this?  I mean, will there always be something trying to keep me here?  My parents are retiring in 2011 and moving down to Carolina, so at that point, I really won't have anything keeping me in the area (besides my job and house, that is).  And my job is good.  Will I be able to find a comparable job out west?  I don't know.

I just hope that I don't keep saying to myself "Two more years", "Three more years", "Five more years", then find myself still kicking around this area when I'm 50 wondering why I never moved out west.  So, hopefully I can develop a plan soon and stick to it.