What. A. Ski. Season. As the local resorts pack it in this weekend, the conversation has turned to reflecting on the winter that won’t end. The consensus seems to be that this is the best ski season in years. Some say it’s the best they’ve ever had in their whole lives (and I hang around with some bona-fide geezers whose lives, if not memories, span a considerable period). It’s certainly the best in the last several years. Last season was all about lunch. Spring arrived in February, and the result was a ski season that lasted from 9:00 to about 12:30 each day before the mountain became a big knee-destroying pile of mush.
This season was all about powder. I’ve always made fun of powder snobs who will only ski if there is a big dump. They may ski a half dozen times a year, and steer clear of the days of packed snow and groomed runs. This year, I have to admit to turning my nose up at a couple of days that offered only four inches of new snow. Last winter, we would have thought we had died and gone to heaven for four inches of powder. This year, well, it was only four inches.
I’m not sure this was my best ski season ever, but it established a new yardstick for measuring future seasons. There are years when I’ve skied more. The year I turned 50, I was on a quest and bagged 107 days. It wasn’t exceptional snow, and some of those days were like having a job. This year I haven’t kept count. Based on a combination of my lunch bills from Deer Valley and the actual electronic count from PCMR, I think I’m finishing off somewhere north of 80 days. Make that 80 great days.
I got into Jupiter one day when they were still blasting over at The Canyons. Apparently everybody else thought the blasting was in Jupiter and didn’t come up. I had the place to myself for an hour or so. Another memorable day was the day the Ruby lift at DV broke. That isolated the Empire Canyon part of the resort. While they figured out how to get people back out of there, they closed the access to Empire. I think there may have been 50 of us who had all the terrain served by the Empire and Lady Morgan chairs to ourselves, all day, with thigh-deep powder. The strange thing about it is that a DV ski patrolman at the bottom of the lift was apologizing for the breakdown that “forced” us to ski untracked powder all day. I can live with such tragedy.
Because the snow was consistently so good, I ended up skiing places I hadn’t skied much for a couple of years. The tree skiing was great, and on the days when there wasn’t fresh powder in the easily accessed places, there were places to hike into. Puma Bowl was frequently closed all day on the heavy snow days, and open fresh and untouched the day after. So I hiked all over the resorts, found every gap in the trees, and covered it all. The ten pounds that usually accumulate over the winter never showed up this year. I skied harder and stronger than ever.
The company was exceptional this season, too. There was the Tuesday group and the Thursday group. And the weekend group. And the iPod filled in on Monday, Wednesday and Friday if nobody else was on the loose. The mix grew and changed as the season went on, guaranteeing fresh jokes and stimulating conversations to match up with the conditions on the mountain. The mix was as eccentric as Park City itself, with a political spectrum that ranged from Rambo to Gandhi, granola-eating Subaru drivers to private-jet fliers, and all points in between. We had boarders, free-heelers, and fixed-heelers, mogul fanatics and corduroy lovers. Old guys who always had to stop to pee and 20-year-old daughters who goaded us into games of “quien es mas macho,” only to prove that there is really no answer to 20-year-old legs. And all of it was just great fun.
None of that would have been possible without a lot of work from a lot of people. Here’s a big thanks to the people doing the hard and boring jobs who made it happen. The ski patrollers who are up before daylight throwing bombs to clear the avalanches; the lifties who have things shoveled out and always seem to know where the wind had loaded up the powder; the people who are up all night plowing snow in the parking lots and on the highways. The list goes on and on. Early in the season, when it looked like this winter was a total bust, we wouldn’t have had Christmas without the snow makers.
Patrick always greeted me with a big smile and heaped extra bacon on my cheeseburger. He may have been trying to bring on a coronary, but I don’t think so. We had talked over the counter about what he does in the off season, and I remembered him from prior years flipping burgers there at Snow Park. A familiar face in the crowd, he knew what I wanted for lunch before I even got in line.
It stayed cold. Even in April, I was wearing the full winter battle gear. The spring gloves never made it out of the closet. Midwinter conditions in April are pretty unusual. I wrapped it up uninjured aside from a creaky shoulder, a squeaky knee, and a deep-down, all-over fatigue. You’ve got to call that a great ski season.
But now that it’s over, let it be over. Enough with the snow. Maybe if we all open the windows and crank the furnace up, it will begin to thaw. You folks with the heated driveways this is no time to be turning them off. Not if we want the trails open before July.
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs On Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for nearly 20 years.