The Snow Was Bad That Day

The staff were taking down the signs. I was somewhere in the middle of a long green run at Vail, on my second day of skiing in about ten years, and the mountain was closing around me.

I could see them working their way down the slope, pulling the orange SLOW signs out of the snow and stacking them up, and I remember a very specific kind of panic arriving. Not the sharp kind. The slow kind. Oh no. The mountain is closing. This is like hiking out past sunset. This could be dangerous. Oh no.

Then I fell again.

I had been falling all afternoon. I fell on the steep parts, which at least made sense. I fell on the flat parts, which did not. I tripped over myself and fell for no good reason at all. And every single time, getting back up cost me a little more than the last time, so by late afternoon I was falling because I was tired and getting tired because I was falling.

The worst part was the cat track. Narrow, endless, a little icy, none of the soft supple snow I’d been given everywhere else. My partner stayed with me. For safety, I think, and probably some sense of responsibility.

By the time I reached the bottom the lifts had stopped spinning and the light had gone grey and flat, the way it does when the sun is already behind the mountain. The runs were completely empty. The SLOW signs were gone.

I had planned this trip for months.

I.The Verdict

About ten years earlier, I went on a company ski trip, and I decided that skiing was not for me.

I had never skied before. I’d somehow missed every ski trip in college, partly because they were expensive and I was a broke student, and partly because computer science kept me in the computer lab most nights. So this was it. My first time.

I knew nothing, and I wasn’t about to buy a pile of expensive gear for something I might hate, so I rented everything. This being California, the shop even rented me a jacket and pants. I did know, either from instinct or from a Google search, that I’d need eye protection and gloves in a cold snowy place. So I brought what I already owned. My regular sunglasses, which were red and quite fashionable. And a pair of mittens I’d picked up in Germany one cold winter, made of a cotton-wool blend or something like it, and definitely, definitely not waterproof.

I signed up for the beginner lesson, the one for people who have never touched skis. We learned how to put them on. How to walk in them. How to pizza. Then we went to the bunny hill and I fell, and fell, and mostly fell.

I wasn’t alone in this. A coworker, just as new as me, had also shown up in his own sunglasses. Late in the day he got on the wrong lift and ended up at the top of a blue run by accident. The way he told it afterward, he came down the entire thing like a snowball. Worse than a snowball.

Here is the part I didn’t understand at the time. At lunch, and again at the end of the day, I kept hearing the more experienced people complain. The snow was terrible. The snow was no good. A lot of runs weren’t open. I had no idea what any of that meant. I was still working on standing up. I was still working on gliding forward one inch without ending up on the ground.

That night I could not get comfortable. The next morning I was covered in bruises and my whole body hurt in places I hadn’t known were involved. It was, honestly, miserable.

So I did the math. Expensive sport. Steep learning curve. Enjoyment: low. And I was starting from very far back, having grown up in Taiwan and not seen snow with my own eyes until high school. The investment did not seem worth it. This skiing thing was not for me.

I shelved it, and I did not think about it again for a decade.

II.The Setup

What changed was a trip to Colorado, years later, with no skiing in it at all. Just a mountain covered in snow, a little trekking, a snowball fight. The mountain was so beautiful that I found myself wondering whether I’d been fair.

Not whether I’d been wrong about myself, exactly. Whether the conditions had been fair. Maybe the whole thing had been set up in a way that made skiing less enjoyable than it actually is.

I had learned this lesson once already, from hiking. Even if you’re a beginner, even if you’re casual about it, a genuinely good pair of boots changes the entire experience. Gear is not a reward you earn after you get good. Sometimes gear is the reason you get to find out whether you like something.

So I went back, and this time I designed it.

The deal I made with myself was that if I still didn’t like it after all this, then it was settled. Skiing wasn’t for me, and I could stop wondering.

I booked Vail, at peak season, when the snow would be good. I stayed at a hotel right next to the gondola so I would barely have to walk or carry my skis anywhere. I still rented the skis and the boots, but I bought my own goggles and my own helmet, which were the two things that would actually touch my face. And remembering exactly how wrecked my body had been the first time, I booked a massage for the third day, after two days of skiing. As much pampering for myself as I could possibly arrange.

Looking back, I think it worked. Not because it made skiing easy. It made it tolerable, which turned out to be the thing I actually needed.

Because falling is just never fun. No matter what. Not in the deepest powder, not in the most pillow-est snow. That part never gets good.

I still took until closing to get down that green run. I still fell on flat ground. But this time, when the day ended, I had a hotel forty steps away and a massage on the calendar, and nothing about it made me want to quit.

III.Powder

The next winter I took more lessons at Mammoth, and then I went to Niseko.

Powder is a completely different substance and nobody can really explain it to you beforehand. Knee deep. Sometimes deeper.

Falling into it is like falling into very soft pillows, and it’s still a surprise every time, because you never planned to fall. In powder it happens fast. Your ski catches something you can’t see and then POOFUMP, off you go, face in the snow. It doesn’t hurt exactly. Your head gets jerked a little, maybe a touch of whiplash. And then you notice how soft it is and realize this fall was far kinder than it had any right to be. Then you have to clean yourself up, because there’s snow all over your face and your goggles and somehow already inside your jacket.

But when you stay on top of it and nothing catches you, you float. You go forward in slow motion.

That was the trip where I skied my first tree run, and the reason I could was the powder itself. Everything slows down in it, which meant I had time to plot my way through and get out of the way. I did a run called Strawberry Fields over and over. It was addicting in a way I had no vocabulary for.

That was also the year I bought my own boots.

IV.Ice

Then there was Big Sky.

The blue I was on that day was closer to a sheet of ice, and it felt like maybe it belonged somewhere between a blue and a black anyway. On ice there’s no grip. None of the usual friction under your skis, none of the control you expect to get from your hips and your ankles. And when the grip goes, your speed picks up, and everything you’ve been trying to learn leaves your body immediately. Form, technique, where your weight is supposed to be. All of it, gone.

What’s left is a very simple wish: I want to not fall and I want to not die.

So I got down the way you get down. A few Z-turns, stop. A few more Z-turns, stop. Not beautifully. Just down.

Montana was gorgeous. I’m sure it’s more gorgeous in a normal year. The locals told us it was the warmest December in twenty or thirty years. The snow was not there when it should’ve been.

V.Cement

At Mt Bachelor I thought my skis were broken.

I clipped in by the lift line the way I always do, pushed forward the way I always do, and something was deeply wrong. We had just driven up from California, so my first thought was that the skis had been damaged in transit. I unclipped, took them off, stood them up, checked the bases. Nothing. They were fine.

It took a few more minutes to accept that the equipment was fine and the snow was the problem. The snow was sticky. Sierra cement, which I had heard of and never felt.

Once I knew to look for it, I saw it everywhere, and some of it was beautiful. The trees at Bachelor had snow glued onto them, thick and sculptural, nothing like the dry snow that just dusts a pine tree in Colorado.

The less beautiful version was that it stuck to my goggles too. It was still lightly storming, and once the snow landed on the lens it got cold and stayed there, and I couldn’t see. I had to stop after a few runs, put my helmet inside my jacket, and let my own body heat defrost it before I could see again. That had never happened to me before.

Three years in, and the mountain was still finding new ways to introduce itself.

VI.Last Season

This past year I bought my own skis. Secondhand, but mine.

The ice and the cement were the same winter. Last season was some of the worst snow North America has had in years. Warm Decembers. Late storms. Snow that wasn’t there when it should’ve been, over and over, in state after state.

Bad snow is the exact condition that made me quit the first time.

Last season I skied close to thirty days in it.

I’m not a good skier. I want to be clear about that, because I don’t want this to read as a story about getting good. Somebody who has skied a handful of times could probably out-ski me. I’m comfortable on blues now and I’ll take an easy black if I’m feeling brave, and that’s genuinely where I am.

But I gave the same sport, in the same bad conditions, a completely opposite verdict.

What I actually did, that first time, was decide in a single day. On rented gear, on bad snow, in a body that had never done any of it before. Skiing went on the list of things that aren’t for me, and I never went back to check it.

Which makes me wonder what else is on that list.