In praise of ski mileage

“Overdoing” certain things can be good. If you drive a big truck across the USA as your full-time job, chances are you become a very skilled and well-rounded driver after twenty or thirty years of roaming the Interstate system, or if you simply lay bricks as a career and enjoy your craft, no one will ever come close to you when it comes to building a straight wall very fast. Skiing is exactly the same; the more you do it, the better you get at it. It thus becomes a matter of mileage and the more diverse the experience becomes (steeps, powder, bumps and crud) the more stable, skilled and rounded a skier you’ll be. Again, the more you ski, the more you learn, the more you become likely to encounter extreme conditions, experience the weirdest kinds of falls, the trickiest types of snow and learn from every bit of that moving target and ever-changing kaleidoscope that skiing really is. Of course, you need to put your heart into it in order for that theory to work; without a good dose of passion or enjoyment mileage won’t deliver its full bounty of benefits. As our three local resorts are shutting down for the season today and leaving at their summits some 120 inches of snow and more than enough to reach their bottom, there’s still plenty of mileage to be added to the odometer by hopping over the canyons and skiing Snowbird, until at least the end of May…