DECEMBER 27, 2023 – This day last year marked my 31st day of skiing in a record season of 128 ski days. I know these numbers because they’re recorded in tally form on our basement wall. This year’s total ski days to date: ZERO, thanks to the cold and snow of winter having so far gone AWOL.
People who know me well have offered their condolences. They’re taken aback when I reply, “To be honest, I don’t miss winter.” I of all people saying this! You might ask fairly what’s in my oatmeal that causes me to talk this way.
The truth is I don’t miss the ice dams on the house; doing the penguin walk to avoid a bone-shattering fall; clearing a major snowfall from walkways and driveway every other day; having the car towed out of the snowbank along the ever-narrowing drive up at the Red Cabin; or hearing in mid-January how much the fuel bill is at the Red Cabin—with three and a half months of winter to go. And I don’t miss hearing other people complaining about winter.
Deep down, of course, I do miss skiing. At the risk of triggering an avalanche of sweet vivid memories, I must adapt to the reality that snow or no snow, I’m not allowed to downhill ski anymore. The multiple myeloma for which I was treated in 2022 made “Swiss cheese” of my skeleton—according to my oncologist after he reviewed my full body scan soon after my diagnosis almost two years ago. I’ve been afforded ongoing bone-strengthening treatments but advised to avoid activities that could involve sudden impact with inanimate objects—such as the ground. I’ve been cleared to x-c ski, but “wink-wink,” last year I stretched this license by skiing “downhill” (on my x-c skis) on the groomed backside of the ski slope (which I dub “St. Moritz”) at “Little Switzerland.”
But I look at the upside of not going downhill: all the money we’re saving by not mounting ski expeditions to the (real) mountains.
Besides, as I discovered on today’s hike up and down the hills of “Little Switzerland,” I can pretend I’m enjoying a stupendously wonderful ski day . . .
My all-time favorite ski mountain was “Big Mountain,” now bearing the less generic name, “Whitefish Mountain Resort,” just outside of Whitefish, Montana; plus, getting there and back—via Amtrak’s Empire Builder—was more fun than the trip to and from any of the many other ski areas I’d visited over the years.
Given its layout and accessibility to lodging, “Big Mountain” was a skier’s dream; a mountain where you could ski your brains out—and I did, logging many thousands of vertical feet of skiing each day from nine to four o’clock. The ski terrain was some of the best and most varied I’d encountered anywhere, and the vistas—Flathead Lake and Valley on one side, the Canadian Rockies on the other—were breathtaking.
It’s been years since I skied “Big Mountain,” but my time there left an indelible impression. Today as I hiked with ski poles up and down the slopes of Como Park Golf Course, I imagined I was in Montana skiing my favorite runs. The simple process of recalling the details of Big Mountain gave me tremendous satisfaction. I could “see” and “hear” sights and sounds I hadn’t visited in years: the snow-encased fir tree “gnomes” at the summit; the brilliant sun dogs and sparkling ice crystals floating like a million miniature dancers above the slopes; the backdrop of stunning mountain scenery; the “thwump, thwump” of my skis going down Ptarmigan Bowl; the wind in my ears as I turned on the after-burners on the “big pitch” on Big Ravine; the total silence of making S-turns through untracked powder on Corkscrew; the hum of the big flywheel as we loaded ourselves onto the high speed quad. As I immersed myself in my memories I could “channel” the intense feeling of skiing 140 tight fast turns from summit to base, then breathless, sending up a shower of snow as I came to a stop—legs burning, heart singing.
Once at the imagined “summit”—in reality the top of so-called “Mt. Como”—I stopped to admire the view. I could “see” the wild and wooly sharp-edged snow-capped peaks of the Canadian range to the north, and they were as magnificent in my mind as they had been every time I’d admired them “on location.”
I then noticed that high over St. Paul, Minnesota were cloud formations in the shape of mountain peaks. By some miraculous means I’d been transported to . . . the mountains . . . or rather, the mountains had come to me.
By the end of my workout, I felt immense gratitude for those memorable days of skiing. Little did I appreciate at the time that I was building an enduring reservoir of mental images, sounds, and sensations.
With winter in abeyance this skier of yore has nonetheless found his groove.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
