I had a little collision skiing the other day. It’s not all that unusual when conditions get like this. With all the warm weather, the snow is kind of unpredictable, with patches of ice mixed in with patches of grabby slush. I heard a guy describe it as “noisy powder” the other day. First thing in the morning, it’s just plain slick out there. You see the collisions developing from the lifts, as people start down the hill in a fairly tight turning area, then gradually widen their turns. As they pick up speed, the turns get to be big, swoopy arcs across the whole face of the run. Skiers who started out parallel to each other, but with considerable distance between them, suddenly are clicking each other’s edges. Then they make full contact and there are skies, poles, hats and goggles flying through the air.
For some reason, Deer Valley seems to have a high number of these. The other resorts have their share of wrecks, often between snowboarders and skiers, whose movements are just different enough that they seem to be unable to anticipate each other. But for fully choreographed, high-speed smashups, it’s hard to beat Bald Mountain at Deer Valley. I was nearly clocked by a woman yakking on her cell phone while skiing down Legal Tender. She was moving right along, skiing fast, while setting up the afternoon manicure. I don’t think she even noticed that she drove me right into the trees on the side of the trail.
Ski collisions can end in some very serious injuries. The rule, of course, is that the downhill skier has the right of way (based on the fact that very few of us ski with rear view mirrors). That seems simple enough, but the typical collision seems to be two skiers who are side by side, with no clear “downhill” position, when one of them abruptly takes a very wide turn and smacks the person next to him or her. It’s hard to know who was at fault there, other than it would help if everybody paid attention.
Fortunately, nobody was hurt in my collision. I hit a squirrel. The horrible scene still plays out before me in slow motion. I was on a fairly flat trail winding through the deep woods at The Canyons. It was the morning after that huge wind, and the trail was covered in pinecones that had blown out of the trees. I was moving pretty slowly on account of not having properly waxed for skiing on pinecones when I spotted the squirrel at the side of the trail ahead of me.
The squirrel was eyeing the pile of pinecones spread before him. He was more focused than a bankrupt insurance company trying to finagle a few billion dollars in bailout cash. The night before, he had gone to bed as poor as a squirrel in winter. The next morning, riches beyond comprehension lay scattered before him, as easy to grab as 17 to 20 pieces of expensive jewelry left in a shoe box in the bedroom closet of a vacant Presidential candidate’s house. The squirrel made a couple of false starts to run across the trail, then paused. We made eye contact as I drew closer to him and slowed down.
Then, without warning, he darted out of the woods, perpendicular to me. He ran right in front of me. There was no time to turn or stop. He scampered right over the top of my skis and was nearly in the clear when my boot came along. I didn’t see, or feel, the impact. A friend skiing behind me saw the whole grizzly scene unfolding. He said my boot hit the squirrel, a solid T-bone, and flung him a couple of feet into the air. It looked like curtains for the little forest creature. But then the squirrel executed a couple of highly skilled inverted aerial moves a double-double-triple and stuck a perfect landing right there in the pile of pinecones. He shook it off, grabbed a pinecone, and darted back across the trail, apparently no worse for wear. But let that be a warning to you our squirrels should be wearing helmets.
I’m still a little flustered by the whole incident.
As a Citigroup shareholder, it’s been quite distressing to watch a company that was once the biggest financial institution in the world go on the dole. It’s reduced to little more than a lemonade stand, though most 10-year-olds playing at a lemonade stand are more solvent than Citi. The stock value has vaporized, and now the dividend is gone. The stock had been popular among retirees who bought it for the reliable dividend income. Now, thanks to stupid (and generously compensated) management, those retirees can go pound sand.
In an effort to appease shareholders, management has provided this handy recession survival tip: Even though the recipes call for Little Friskies, you can save a lot by substituting a generic or store-brand cat food. If you salt the bejesus out of it, you’d hardly notice the difference.
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 more than 20 years.