The (singular) way I ski ...

For those of us (a select few, I realize) who happen to ski alone, we all have our personal way of spending our day on the mountain. I happen to be one of those, even though I ski mostly with family members between 20 and 30 percent of my time when I’m not alone on the mountain. Since I’ve never studied the habits of lone skiers, I can only speak for myself and that’s what I want to share with you. 

First, remember that I love skiing unconditionally. All weather, snow, terrain and change in visibility seem to work for me. The exception being, obviously, crowding. There are limits to that blanket statement of course when a thick fog wraps everything up, it never makes for a comfortable experience! 

Yet, I embrace the entire premise of the sport and over a long season there are few days that I might consider to be despicable. My way of skiing is more of an unstructured happening that takes me from place to place on the mountain, without much of a plan, yet that takes current conditions and crowding into consideration. 

I have just a few principles that I never deviate from. If a ski run is defined at least by leaving a top lift station and skiing to the bottom of that or another lift to ascend again, the ski run thus defined is always non-stop, the exception to that rule being the need of relieving myself behind a tree. Non-stop skiing is crucial to my skiing as it forces me to adapt and improvise to the ever changing terrain or slope conditions and forces me to become even more instinctive in my ways of skiing. 

Then, I always make sure that I ski a difficult run or some bad snow, wherever I happen to find myself on the hill, just to push the envelope and keep on bettering myself technically. Because I’m on the last stretch of my life and that my ski days are counted, the final rule is that I ski as fast as conditions permit, yet permanently stay in control which narrows my range of action and forces me to concentrate at all times.

This results is having an uphill to downhill time-ratio very much tilted towards spending most of my time sitting on a ski-lift. During that enormous “dead time” if I can use that word, I don’t seem to think much, except mentally debrief the last descent, draw conclusions that might be worth memorizing as a bona fide learning experience and also deciding where my next run will take me, which often end up being a thorny dilemma. 

When skiers are visible I observe them and always try to learn something from the way they ski. I also look for new lines, new pathways through the trees or I’ll scrutinize a ridge to see if there are skiers there and make sure I don’t miss a thing around me. When the folks sitting next to me are talkative, I will happily engage in a conversation with them that I always find enjoyable. 

When I’m alone on a lift, I let myself soak into the surrounding natural elements and it’s for me an extra form of meditation. What I hate is to have to take pictures or shoot videos while I ski. I find it cumbersome and it damages the “flow” of the whole experience. Of course, I love having these pictures and that footage afterwards! 

Then, there’s the time factor. I consider my time skiing extremely precious so I always plan how many rides I can fit into that window of time and waste not a single moment from the moment I slide into a lift corral to the time my feet touch the ground at the top station. I’m a slave to my watch that keeps the pace and runs my schedule through the entire outing. 

I know the time it takes to get from here to there, just like when I was a ski instructor and was under the time constraint of the one-hour lesson. All the way back over to my car, there are no idle moments, all flows well as if choreographed with not much left for random events or happenstance. That’s the way I ski.