Ski season is off to a great start. The snow conditions at Park City are midwinter good, with coverage adequate everywhere but a couple of wind-blasted ridges. Jupiter is still a ways off, but that terrain takes a lot of snow to cover things up. McConkey’s is open, and very good. It’s barely December and I’ve already had some good days out there.
Deer Valley’s season starts today with almost everything open. Canyons is still struggling with some construction delays on its new lifts. That’s rightfully frustrated a lot of season-pass holders who are looking at the conditions next door and wondering why they can’t ski. But the new lifts will really solve the morning bottleneck getting people up the mountain and make for a much better experience there. So a little patience will be rewarded in the long run.
The first couple of days out are always interesting. Rounding up the ski gear is a challenge. I made the mistake of trying to bring some sense of order and organization to my house early in the spring. The end result is that I couldn’t find anything. Fortunately, I starting the hunt a couple of days before the season opener, and was able to locate enough to get on the mountain, and the rest has turned up over time usually while I’ve been looking for something else. Why the goggles were in the bin with the spare tractor spark plugs is beyond me.
My legs were a bigger concern than the gear. Most years I’ve spent the summer on my bike and go into the ski season feeling very strong. This year I spent more time farming than biking, and was afraid things would be wobbly. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it came back quickly. The first day was kind of painful, and the first deep powder run down Waterfall was just plain ugly. But after a couple more days, it’s back. The mountain is empty midweek, and not too busy on the weekends this time of year. Let’s hope the snow keeps on coming.
On other fronts, I had one of those experiences this week where one of life’s minor, but constant, annoyances was solved. All the appliances in my house were plugged in on the same day 25 years ago. They have been dropping like flies lately. The latest is the washer, which is making unhealthy noises and putting me on notice that the end is near. It’s clearly time to replace it and there are some great sales on.
The washer and dryer live in a little closet in the upstairs hall. The closet is 5 feet wide, which is plenty of space for them. But the door is only 4 feet wide, making it a real puzzle to get them in there, and only a few models will fit at all. I had to find circus contortionists get things connected. And for 25 years every load of wash has involved some uncomfortable stretching around the too-narrow doorway to get into the machines. There are actual wear marks on the door where I have banged my elbows on almost every load.
Worse, when I went to buy new ones, I learned that they have changed the dimensions of washers, and the new ones weren’t going to fit in there at all. I drove the guy at Home Depot crazy stopping in a couple of times a week to measure and re-measure washers just in case they had miraculously become smaller. The door is in a bearing wall, and not something I could just attack with the Sawzall to widen things out. Over Thanksgiving, with the washer making new and alarming noises, I concluded that the only real option was to get brave and knock a hole in the drywall to see what was actually in there.
Once I could see inside the wall, I discovered that when the house was built, the door over the washer closet was framed as a full 5 feet. The header is full width. It was even finished off at that width, complete with metal drywall corners. Then for some reason, they went in later and narrowed the door to an elbow-smashing 4 feet and installed the doors that effectively narrowed it down to about 3 feet. The only thing I can figure is that they were anxious to finish up, and when they went to the lumberyard, the only door in stock was a 4-footer. Rather than wait to order the 5-foot bi-fold door set, they just narrowed the opening to fit the available door, and I’ve cursed it almost every day for 25 years.
The new washer and dryer will fit in the remodeled space without a problem.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland, and has been writing this column for nearly 25 years.