The fallout of the Winter That Wasn’t for me began with wondering about the worth of a season ski pass.
I’d already soured some on Park City Mountain. Too crowded and the runs didn’t suit me like other mountains. Like Snowbasin, for instance. Snowboarding had become mind over knee, besides, though very weirdly I could trail run just fine, and so I did at Round Valley way more than I boarded these past two winters.
I guess the 7% bump in the Epic pass price for the 2025/26 season tipped me over in the end. I felt just fine not renewing and thereby resigning myself to running in the snow, snowshoeing, maybe giving cross country skiing another go. No chance of floating in powder, that thrill. But I do like the burning in the legs and the lungs, and sweating, with the endurance sports.
OK, not like, precisely. I value earning satisfaction along with better fitness maybe even more than lucking into giddy moments, even with the feel like none other of sliding and turning on a steep, fluffy slope.
But then I won a half-off deal at Snowbasin in an auction at which on a whim I bid ridiculously low, and won. A signal from above? Had to be. Snowbasin is about as far from my home as Palisades Tahoe and Northstar were from where I lived in the northern California foothills, no big deal. I used to board early before landing in our Truckee office mid-week at mid-morning.
This season, I loved working remotely from the lodge at the top of Snowbasin’s Needles Express Gondola. But other than that, winter wasn’t great.
When there was snow, the place swarmed ants on spilled sugar. I often found myself stuck between novices who were so slow and wannabes going way too fast. I was a pinned target. And the knee ached more than I found fun while taking my turns. Interesting how pain sloughs away when you’re having a good time, but kicks in as it does when you definitely are not.
Then Snowbasin closed like a month early. Instead of frustration, I felt … relief at the news. Oh, oh.
So yeah, I think I’m done.
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I went through something like this with sailing. Peaking at pure love. Then a long fade, chasing memories and finding them ever more elusive to fully live again, that same delight. Eventually finding a last excuse to move on.
My dad was borderline famous in Hawaii’s racing circle as a coveted helmsman. His dad had a quiet role in forming the Waikiki Yacht Club. A legacy was set, surely.
But I was a sensitive child, I’m sure a real pain in the …. My first memory of sailing was howling in terror as the sleek 210 class boat my dad raced on nosed out around sunset into the ocean from the Ala Wai Harbor.
Whoa, the whole boat tipped with the gusts and I could see water sloshing at our feet. We were slicing ahead fast, and the grownups were chattering. My dad tried to explain how it worked, how sailing goes — the mast, the sail, the wind, see? All I saw was the low side of the boat leaning dangerously close to letting in the whole ocean, and we were farther from land than I’d ever been or wanted to be.
Then they tacked. More terror as the boom swung like a scythe and sails snapped and now the other side was tipping too far, too far, like I was going to fall in, while my father and his friends laughed, heedless. And then again. And again.
I was asked recently to describe my favorite spot on Earth, and up floated a memory from some years later on another extremely tippy boat, a single-handed racing dinghy, a Laser, planing faster than the swells off the same shore. Only I’d put the island out of sight before turning for the ride back in, hull humming. Big wind, biggish seas, big sun, everything shades of blue, and warm. Pure bliss, if bliss could include the high likelihood of capsizing. Which happened, me laughing while climbing back aboard at my favorite place, right there, bobbing, sail flapping like a gunfight as I luffed the boat, green Oahu now firmly on the horizon.
But overall, I liked body surfing and then board surfing better, a lot better. And then I moved on from both. Into the mountains. Felt like it was time, and I was chasing a girl.
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But this probably had more to do with fire. Farthest thing from my dad’s world, and I think I did have some daddy issues then. My parents divorced when I was young and Mom fled with my sister and I to Southern California, where she was from. I flew back within the week of graduating from high school.
My dad and I, we sailed together, we drank together, we lived together as brothers. We even once chased the same woman, a little older than was reasonable for 19-year-old me, and inappropriately yet surprisingly attainably for my father, still in his 40s. It was hilarious. She was tickled with both of us. And her boyfriend was her age, thank you very much. Still, it was a great friendship.
My dad was cut from what I’ll call the Ernest Hemingway man’s man cloth, and though we interacted more as brothers, there remained an undertow. It didn’t help that my very name was his, only with Junior at the end. The shadow was long, at least in Hawaii it was. I was Donald the Lesser, no question. Donny or Junior. A classic story, the tilt between father and son.
It took fighting wildland fire on the most elite crew in the world of its kind, and actually being good at it, to find that something my dad finally accepted as another man, no longer the boy he saw until then. Yes, I’m aware that a huge part of this was really me accepting me, at last, as I am.
And fire, well, that left me while I was still all in, only clipped by recurring knee injuries enough to know this too would have to pass into memory.
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What does all this have to do with the price of skiing in Park City? Besides taking life’s turns in various elements the Greeks thought made up an entire world, and leaving each element behind at some point?
What’s left is the earth underfoot, feet on a trail. Maybe different elemental lessons ahead. Or if this whole life thing is a cycle, I’ll probably buy that Laser I’ve been thinking about since seeing the fleet on the Jordanelle, a flock of white sails tipped together on a ruffled shimmer, a mirror.
Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.