I’m a world-class procrastinator. In fact, I’m pretty sure I could hold the official record except that I never got around to submitting the paperwork. There’s a note on my refrigerator door reminding me to get the tires rotated — on a car I traded nine years ago.
So it’s no surprise that ski season has finally arrived — completely without warning — and I’m not ready.
The gang is going out for the first day pass-holder event at Deer Valley. They always do a nice soft opening for season pass holders and you can’t miss opening day. That was scheduled for Nov. 29, and I registered for it and was all ready to go. Then winter didn’t come and the opening got delayed a whole week (to what, in fairness, was the typical opening day at Deer Valley for 35 or 40 years).
So with that extra week to have everything organized, you would think maybe I could be ready to go. I should be like a firefighter ready to roll out of bed and slide down the pole, fully suited up for action in a matter of minutes.
Wrong.
There was only one ski pole. There’s no good reason why the second ski pole would have gone missing. They travel in pairs, but it was not in the room with all the other ski gear.
After turning the storeroom and the garage upside down, I remembered back in July that a muskrat had clogged up a culvert, and a shovel handle wouldn’t clear it. I needed something rigid, with a bit of a widened end on it — and a ski pole did the trick.
So the errant ski pole was right there in the bed of the pickup with all the other remains of summer. It took a while to get it untangled from a couple of pieces of wire that I’d found in fields and tossed in there. After mucking out the truck bed, I had both poles.
I anticipated the snow conditions to be something less than ideal for opening day. A few years ago, I bought a pair of skis designed for rock hard, East Coast conditions. I hate them. They are too long for me, and can’t be turned in soft snow, let alone powder. But on the hard pack, they hold an edge like a speed skater. They also have the old-style telemark bindings on them.
More than once I’ve arrived at opening day with 75mm bindings and NTN boots that are completely incompatible. Or the reverse. So double and triple check that — and make sure I don’t have a 75mm left boot and a NTN right — which will match up nicely with the two left gloves I found carefully hooked together.
Normally by now, stuff has had a good dose of waterproofing. But in a year when it didn’t rain all summer, the whole concept of wet weather escaped me, and nothing got sprayed. Now it’s too cold to do it outside, and I can’t stand the smell of it inside, so unless things warm up a lot, the gloves are what they are — old and duct taped and not particularly water resistant.
My size was sold out at the end-of-the-season sales last year, and the thought of paying retail for new gloves is problematic. But one day, when my fingers are brittle from the cold, I’ll get desperate and replace them, probably at Montage gift shop prices.
I bought my pass last summer when they were offering a bit of a discount. Deer Valley mailed the new pass, and I used it a couple of times to ride the lifts to watch the new lift towers get helicoptered into place. According to the website, I already have two day of skiing and they aren’t even open.
Then I got a second pass in the mail, this time from planet Ikon in Colorado. They have different numbers, they are different formats, but have the same 10-year-old photo of me on them.
Which do I use? So both are getting zipped into different pockets until that gets sorted out.
Gear aside, the biggest hurdle for the first day is that I’m a year older and spent most of the summer nursing a very bad ankle sprain. So I suspect that I’m physically as scattered as the gear. One knee makes weird noises when I walk down the stairs in the morning to let the dogs out. It didn’t used to do that.
But little by little, it will all come together. The conditions are such that the steep stuff isn’t ready yet, which is good because I’m not ready for it just yet. Hopefully dramatic improvement in snow conditions and personal conditioning will converge quickly.
Scattered or not, the season is on — thanks to the snowmaking crew, the groomers, lift mechanics and everybody else who pulled it together.
We never know what winter will bring. My hornet nest winter forecast was a bust this year. It turns out the hornets were federal employees who got furloughed during the shutdown, and no prediction data was available.
So it will be what it is, with some unexpectedly good days and some days on hard pack. But there are no bad days on the mountain.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.