Miners Day Parade

Miners Day is Park City's version of Labor Day. We used to have silver in our mountains; today we mine them to extract visitors fun! We have a great parade to celebrate all the town's workers and my wife and I only attended that parade once, with our kids, when we first came to town some 25 years ago. We had taken for granted the 24 other celebrations in between, I guess. Returning yesterday was a surprise as the place was packed with thousands of eager spectators.

There were very, very few old faces that we recognized. All these folks were unknown to us. We rode the bus to Main Street and returned with our free city-wide transportation system. I even shot a video to memorialize the whole event. It was a celebration of work and after watching all the floats, trying to get some freebees and a lot of candy, we were both exhausted; we should have known better, Labor Day is all about work, work, work!

Returning to the Great Western Trail

This single track is a wonderful way to trek along the Park City valley and Big Cottonwood Canyon, home to Brighton and Solitude resorts. For the most part, the trail just stay below the 10,000 feet level affording incredible vistas. We used to hike it a lot and once, even went all the way down to Salt Lake City, via Mill Creek Canyon.

Yesterday was a perfect day for this type of excursion even though we only hiked just 8 mile round-trip; let's call this a warm up exercise, but on the end of the one way course, our picnic never tasted so good. The only challenging part is of course accessing the higher elevation via “vomit hill,” but on foot that's always doable; on mountain bike, this can be a totally different experience, hence the nickname and many are the riders who end up walking their bike all the way up. Our next plan is to ride our bikes on that wonderful single track from Gardman's Pass all the way to Salt Lake; we just need to figure out how to organize the car shuttle...

On a roll...

I recently read an article in Skiing Heritage about the use of hand-held snow rollers that were used in the grooming of ski slopes up until the late fifties in America and well into the mid-sixties in the French Alps. I remember this because my brother Gaston was, in the early sixties, what was called a “pisteur-secouriste” which amounted to doing the combined job of snow groomer and ski patrolman. As I recently called him on his 70th birthday, I asked him about his experience riding these gravity-powered groomers.

On a snow day, the crew would catch the 7 am tram at Le Pleney, in Morzine, France, prepare the heavy equipment and begin work in team of two; one in the front, the other in the back. On intermediate slopes the job was fairly easy depending on the amount of fresh snow received; if there was too much of it, the first run, called the “B,” a long, meandering beginner run would take a good three hour to complete as the first team of rollers could come to a screeching halt in some of the flatter sections of the run. The second team by slightly overlapping their predecessors' tracks might carry a little bit more speed and wouldn't have to pull on the rollers as much in order to keep them moving. Steeper slopes were a different story altogether as speed control was a huge problem, especially for the man placed in front who relied on his rear buddy to "stay the course" and had to deal with the extra challenge of being blinded by all the snow plastered by the roller right into his face. The rollers were equipped with some internal brakes that were actuated by lowering the the two pairs of holding shafts, requiring at times very high force, but the weight and the momentum of the whole speeding device could become so significant that high-speed crashes were not uncommon. In fact, the best ways to keep speed under check remained an "athletic" snowplow as well as some powerful side-slipping...

The packing job was also far from perfect, as it depended a lot on snow depth, overall humidity and temperature; the five to seven hundred pounds of the rollers were still relatively light, and were just making the run passable for the first skiers of the day. Once packed, the snow couldn't be changed or tilled by these primitive rollers as this is the case today with the much heavier and powerful machinery. In the nascent Avoriaz ski resort, steel grids were passed on the run to breakup the crust, but never came close to true "grooming" as we know it today. Upon arrival at the base, the shaft assembly was taken apart and loaded back into the tram and sometime on a double-chair, along with the roller for another grooming session or would be left at the top ready for a future snow storm. Smaller rollers with only one set of holding shafts were also available for grooming smaller areas, including the uphill surface lift track.

The end of the sixties saw the end of grooming with hand-held rollers at Le Pleney, as the Ratrac snow groomer, an adaptation of the Thiokol snow cat, made its debut in the Alps and raised the art of grooming to a totally different level...

The next provinces Canada should annex...

For a very long time, the joke was that Canada really was the 51st state of the United States. In today's economy, the tables are turned and our northern neighbor is now giving us some formidable lessons in good stewardship. Its currency keeps on getting stronger, its economy is sound and the quality of life of its citizens has become the envy of the developing world. So with all this, why not see us being annexed by Canada and becoming one or a bunch of extra provinces. We'd give up our weak Dollar for a new currency called the “Puck” - like in hockey – and an enlarged Canada would get rid of the aging British monarch on its bank notes.

While we're on the subject, hockey would become our national sport, we'd be the largest country in the world, in term of total area, we'd have a wonderful healthcare system and we'd send all the tea-party folks and staunch republicans way south to a country like say, Paraguay, to spread their gospel of trickle-down economics, war and moral order. The good news for me in a larger Canada is that my two languages would now be official and we'd finally become a metric country!

Smarter timing

The years preceding our economic crash have given some people some very bad business habits. Consider this: A couple of weeks ago, I went to see a local architect to work estimate of how much an extension of an existing building would cost. Call this a feasibility study. The man said that this would be fine, told me how his consulting would cost – which amount was fine with me – but told me to get him a survey of the place before he could do anything. He gave me the name of three surveyors and I proceeded to call them yesterday to find out about their respective fees.

The fee required by these professionals was astounding and represented three times what the architect was asking, almost defeating the purpose of what all along was a getting a peek into the overall cost of the project. I then called back the architect and asked him if there was no way to conduct his estimate without a formal, updated land survey, understanding of course that it would somehow affect the precision of the numbers he'd come up with. He reluctantly accepted without any good reasons against the order of thing. Some folks, and particularly these self-proclaimed “professionals” don't have much logic in their understanding of sound business practices, proper sense of which comes when and still put their own interests and convenience first, well before that of their clients...

Early morning inspiration

You hear all the time that many people get their best ideas in the shower or in some very specific places and circumstances. For me, it's always the same; if something preoccupies me a great deal, I'll wake up in the wee hours of the morning, often with a solution or most of the time, on the verge of solving that current problem of mine. That's my best thinking moment and it certainly is my most creative environment. I guess that I go to sleep with a puzzle to solve, my subconscious mind gets to work and when it's about ready, it wakes me up with some answers or at least a few useful threads to follow... What about you?

The President's speech

I, for one, was disappointed by President Obama's speech last night; it was downbeat and it lacked the courage to call the Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation was: A useless and ruinous war. I don't think trying to call for bi-partisanship is still something he should attempt at this point; instead, he should aggressively go after the Republican obstructionism that has – successfully – brought him down in the polls. This would be called political courage, but Mr. Obama is going to choke its presidency by trying to compromise and attempting to appease its detractors.