Sunday night’s biblical rainstorm inevitably turned into Monday morning’s ice storm. Underneath a couple of feet of new snow was a lethal layer of ice. On the lifts, the ice had glommed onto the cables and chair grips. Those globs of ice had the potential to knock the cable off the tower, or prevent the detachable chair grips from holding on to the cable. So between the ice, avalanche control, some road closures and a million tourists in town, the opening on Monday was not pretty. I believe the technical term for it is “cluster.”
The line exploded out of the maze and started working its way up the slope. The lift was moving a little slowly, and the people getting on were even slower. Everything was caked with ice. I’ve never seen so many people unable to get on a nearly stopped chair before. Mis-load after mis-load stopped the lift while they dragged the fallen out of the pit and reassembled them. At Alta, in the old days, they just shot people who mis-loaded and left the bodies in the drifts until spring. This being Deer Valley, people who fell were immediately assigned a valet to clean them up, a coach to try to instruct them on how to load a chair, and a therapist to deal with the embarrassment. That slowed things even more; it takes a while to repair self-esteem.
People were all pretty good about it. What else are you going to do? It’s not like we all wanted to hop on a chair that was going to drop off the cable because of the ice. But when a girl crashed the whole lift because she urgently needed to update her Facebook page just as the chair arrived, taking out the other three people with her and knocking both skis off two of them, you could feel the crowd turning on her. There was powder to be skied. If not for the crowd being filled with the Christmas spirit, I think she might have been skewered with a thousand ski poles. (Note no similar holiday spirit prevails at Presidents Day, so figure it out by then.)
But the air was indeed thick with Christmas spirit, with hundreds of people beginning their holiday vacations with great new snow. Nobody was breaking out into song, yet there clearly was a sense that if the most serious problem to be faced that day was that the mountain was on hold because of too much snow, life must be OK.
We live in an amazing place, surrounded by abundance, even if things have been somewhat less abundant than a couple of years ago, when, to be fair, things got pretty ridiculous in the abundance department. We have abundance in material things, but also a more important abundance in the sense of what is around us. There is the natural beauty of the mountains, and the majestic power of a big storm to rearrange our plans. There are little things that brighten the day. For example, there seem to be a lot of ermine around this year. I don’t know why, but I see them around my house, on the ski hill, and Linda on the radio says she sees them in Swede Alley those would be urban ermine.
The other morning driving into town, there was a bald eagle flying over Richardson Flat. (Yes, Virginia, even the old tailings pond can be pretty at times.) A crow was dive-bombing the eagle, which didn’t seem to care a whole lot. They may have been competing over the same carcass, but the two of them were diving and soaring in tandem. It was cool enough that I pulled over to watch for a few minutes. Certainly better than “Dancing with the Stars.” Lately we’ve had some unusual traffic problems in my neighborhood a flock of wild turkeys waddles down the middle of the highway.
This has been a good year. I’ve been more involved in the day-to-day operations of the ranch than usual, and have found a sense of satisfaction from the same work I’d have shot my foot off to avoid as a teenager. Early in the spring, I was adopted by a three-legged golden retriever. He doesn’t let a day go by without letting me know how happy he is to have found my house. He plays and wrestles all day with my old dog, and seems to have cut her age by half. He demands a good walk every day from me, too.
At Christmas, we all appreciate what we have, and the friends and family who make life as good as it is. Merry Christmas, everybody, even that girl who can’t get on the lift.
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.