Park City Mountain’s mid-season grade

Our charming town of Park City has two ski resorts that are competitors. Deer Valley (let’s call it DEAR Valley because it’s outrageously expensive) and the other one I’d call “Fail Valley” for the sake of symmetry. In fact its name is Park City Mountain (PCM) and it’s where I do more of my skiing. 

The nickname “Fail Valley” I gave it is based on three reasons. First, symmetry, ans second, as I first said, “Fail” is the way a German would pronounce “Vail” in Vail Resorts (VR), its parent company, and the meaning of “fail” being not succeeding at anything, except separating customers from their money and giving them “in-mass” disappointment in return. 

That’s right, PCM does everything "too little too late". Its snow making efforts are “reluctant” as Vail Resorts is far too cheap to invest into it. Not only it barely maintains its ski lifts, but it also falls short of maintaining its slopes invaded by bush and new tree growth everywhere and not trimming as regularly as they should because it costs money. 

This is terrible when the snow is so thin like this season, and this vegetation becomes very dangerous. Its lifts are for the most part old and slow (fixed grip) and are more fit to go to a museum (Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan buy used detachable lifts from the Alps to equip their ski slopes, they don’t even consider fixed grip systems anymore!

Still, there’s some good news compared to the past, we’ve got The Canyons’ new parking structure that’s both spacious and clean, but there again, VR must have purchased "pot-holes" in bulk, that they had to place strategically on the access and egress roads. Wow! I couldn't miss that one. Once inside the structure, it’s pretty hard to figure out how to exit and some better signage would go a long way in helping users to drive out safely. 

In addition, chairlifts keep on stopping continuously, defeating the purpose of being detachable (now I start to understand VR’s fixation on fixed-grip chairs – pardon the pun) and while I’m on the subject of chairlifts, the 8-chair replacement planned for Silverlode is another bad idea. Given the way VR operates its chairs, having 8 folks in line at loading or unloading time, will result in even more stoppages than is the case now (increased domino effect). 

My idea of a bypass from the base of Silverlode to a relocated base of Motherlode further down in the drainage and going to Puma Ridge would be vastly superior. Finally, I wish VR comes up next year with a more attractive pass for Seniors. Absent this, I might switch from Fail Valley to DEAR Valley! 

Dying doing what we love !

This is an expression I have heard several times about skiers meeting their mortality while skiing. I’m not talking about tragic accident mind you, like avalanche, collisions, slide on slick slopes, etc., but “natural death”, most often than not caused by a timely massive heart failure on the ski slopes, happening to an avid skier. 

Of course the saying “He died doing what he loved”, that’s in fact a coping mechanism, not a literal truth. It perhaps works for the victim, if the assumption is correct (which we generally failed to verify), but tragic for the widow or widower and the next of kin that end up picking the pieces in a moment that end up being a bit awkward given the circumstances. 

When someone collapses on a ski slope from a heart attack, the people around them instinctively reach for a narrative that softens the shock. Saying “he died doing what he loved” is a way to reduce the randomness of the event, give the moment a sense of dignity and reassure everyone that the person wasn’t suffering in a hospital bed. 

There’s also a cultural element as skiing, climbing, sailing, are activities with a built‑in mythology. People who love them often talk about them as a way of life, not just a hobby. So when someone dies in that context, the narrative almost writes itself. It’s not that the sentiment is false; it’s just incomplete. I remember two people that die this way.

One was Max Marolt a ski rep for Look bindings when I came to America in 1977 and an icon of skiing and politics in Aspen who died at 67 after suffering a heart attack while skiing at Las Leñas in Argentina on July 28, 2003. The other was the French ski champion Adrien Duvillard who died while skiing on his native Megève, at Mont d'Arbois, on February 14, 2017 at age 82. 

I too would love to die that way, but I don’t think my wife would be thrilled!

The uncanny nature of skiing… (Part Three)

So now that we’ve looked at so many aspects of skiing that are seldom discussed, I propose that we try to understand why skiing can becomes more dangerous as we age. This could be in large part because of its apparent ease and feeling of freedom, skiing often hides our true physical and mental state until the moment its needed the most. 

There’s the “fresh start illusion” that occurs because the lift offers us an opportunity to rest and resets us, we never feel the gradual fatigue that warns us to stop. We think we’re fine, until you’re not. We all know that reaction time declines with age, so even a tiny delay in correcting one’s balance, edge-control, weight adjustment and response to various terrain and snow conditions can turn a small mistake into a severe fall.

As most of us know, falls are new desirable nor good for old persons! Beyond that aspect, skiing demands instant reactions, but aging slows them down and the fun nature of the sport hides that fact. In addition, our strength declines faster than our confidence. 

Our mind remembers what you used to do, but our body can’t always deliver it, leading to a dangerous mismatch. Adding adrenaline to cold also give us a false sense of capability as we feel sharper, stronger, and more confident than we actually are. High speeds magnify small errors and at 30–40 mph, a 1% lapse quickly becomes a 100% problem. 

Then there’s vision and depth perception that subtly degrade with time, making flat light, snowy conditions, and speed much harder to process visually. Finally, fatigue hits all at once, because skiing masks it so well, so when it’s there, it’s often faster than we have time to react. Our legs give out, our balance collapses, our attention drops and our reflexes are gone. 

This is when most accidents happen, the last run, the last hour, the “one more” moment. In conclusion, it’s so true that skiing feels like a young person’s sport even when we’re older because the sport is so good at hiding the usual signals of aging. 

That’s the big paradox; we never feel out of breath, our muscles don’t burn, we don’t sweat, we don’t feel any pain, don’t suspect the fatigue coming, and still feel 25 until the moment our body reminds us that we’re a tad older than that. 

That’s the danger, try to remember these stark realities and don’t forget them!

The uncanny nature of skiing… (Part Two)

As promised, I wanted to explore why skiing feels so effortless yet intense, later we’ll also see how it can become dangerous as it "masks" one's true physical and mental condition and could have dire consequences in terms of potential accidents. It’s true that skiing is one of the strangest sports in the world because it creates a perfect illusion of feeling effortless, smooth, and almost weightless, yet it demands enormous material, physical and mental resources, all in a variety of amounts.  

As many have said before “It feels as liberating as flying and frees us from the tyranny of gravity...” That mismatch between effortless and thrilling is also why it can become dangerous, especially as people age. The sport can perfectly hide our true physical condition until the moment we need it most. So why does this happen and why is skiing’s “masking effect” so powerful? 

It’s clearly one of the few sports where gravity achieves a critical part of the work. When we ski, we’re not propelling ourselves much, we’re mostly managing our momentum. The ski-lift does the hardest part, we don’t climb the mountain, don’t earn the descent (unlike with Alpine randonnée), but somehow start fresh every run! This means, much less physical fatigue, no cardiovascular warning signs, less gradual buildup of exhaustion as skiers go from “resting” to “high-speed athletic performance” instantly. 

A combination of gravity and muscle work provides the propulsion and that hybrid balance varies vastly, depending on a skier’s experience, the weather, their competitive nature, proficiency on snow and external factors like snow, slope and visibility as one’s body can be working hard to stabilize, absorb shocks, and react as fast as it can. High mileage and old skiers like my rely more and more on gravity as brute force diminishes. Still there are subtle forms of exertion that take place. 

Adrenaline, the result of speed and risk, masks weakness, as it boosts confidence. It also hides pain and fatigue as it temporarily sharpens focus! While skiing feels easy, it can be very intense even when we’re not under the impression of “working hard” in the traditional sense. It demands much concentration as well as high-speed decision-making as we’re making micro-adjustments every fraction of a second and it can be mentally exhausting, but we don’t notice it until later. 

It also requires a constant, eccentric muscle loading as our quads, buttock muscles, and core are absorbing force, not producing it. Eccentric work like this feels easier, but fatigues muscles faster and without being noticed. Up in our brain there’s plenty to do as we’re processing snow quality, terrain difficulties, other users, speed and visibility. All this also drains mental energy without feeling like “effort.” 

Finally, our body is constantly correcting itself, using deep stabilizer muscles that also tire quickly but quietly. So as you can see, a lot of strain is put on the body without us knowing it. We’ll continue tomorrow, with a few darker sides of skiing, so please come back! 

The uncanny nature of skiing… (Part One)

My whole life has evolved in a universe of winter sports and in it I’ve earned my family living. That’s why my whole life and career have been dominated by skiing, as a paradoxical sport that is for the most part, "assisted", in the sense that most of the physical effort required to perform these activities is supplied by a ski lift (chairlift, tram, etc.), most by gravity and the rest by some muscular assistance. 

 Half-jokingly, I’ve always liked to say that skiing was a “lazy-man’s sport” and it’s probably true! This made me wondering what other sports, if any, could fall in that category. It’s true that skiing and snowboarding are unique because the hardest physical part, climbing up the mountain, is outsourced to a machine. 

In this series, I’ll be using the word “skiing” to simplify things and apply it also to “snowboarding”. The activity itself is seen as quite active and as a “sport”, but most of the energy input required comes from an external system (the chairlift and other means to get up the mountain). 

It we define an “assisted sport” as a sport where a mechanical system provides the primary elevation, propulsion, or access needed to participate, there are indeed several other activities that fit the same pattern. Here’s a quick overview: . 

1. Mountain biking (lift‑access downhill), 

2. Paragliding and hang gliding (when using a tow system like a boat), 

3. Scuba diving when boat-assisted to do the “transportation work”, 

4. Rock climbing through gym auto-belays or mechanical ascenders, 

5. Motorsports like ski-doo, jet ski, motocross, etc., 

7. Indoor skydiving where a vertical wind tunnel provides lift and resistance 

8. Surfing with jet-ski tow-in, and 

9. Other sports that are “assisted” in a different way, like cart-assisted golfing, sailing when wind provides propulsion, glacier hiking (tram-assisted) and indoor climbing with auto-belay. 

Still, skiing feels unique because it sits at a special intersection as it is a gravity-powered sport using machine-powered access and offering high-speed motion. It also costs minimal metabolic effort to start each run. Very few other sports listed here combine all four. 

Only downhill mountain biking and tow-assisted paragliding are the closest analogues. Tomorrow we’ll explore what makes skiing so effortless, but so thrilling. To find out, just stay with me...

My take on the ’26 Olympics

Thank god, the Olympics are over! I was getting weary of that five-ring circus, everyday for 2 weeks. The 2026 Games brought some 2,900 athletes from 92 countries to Italy, competing for some 116 medal events. The event covered 16 disciplines across 8 sports.

This marks the first Winter Games with 116 events and a high female participation at 47%, the highest in Winter Olympic history, with competitions taking place in venues from Milan, Livigno, Bormio, Val di Fiemme, Predazzo, Anterselva/Antholz and of course Cortina d'Ampezzo. 

I didn’t care about the medal count, as I love all nations and I’m not chauvinistic enough to fall into that narrow rut. 

What I didn’t like is that there are now far too many events to be able to navigate and understand them all. Some are just weird, just don't belong, and I thought ski-mountaineering was a joke and, once more, found that not all medals are far from being created equal. 

The IOC has become a money-making machine, deep into the entertainment business. The Games and the IOC would require huge reforms, but don’t count on it. Once more I’m glad it’s over and 2030 will arrive faster than I need or want!

Snow at least!

On February 17, our long snow drought ended as I was able to sample the delights of Utah’s fabled powder snow for (almost) the first time this season. From a historical standpoint, this year’s drought over the Rocky Mountains and over Utah and Park City is a record-breaking one. 

According to SNOTEL data and historical weather logs, February 2026 has seen the lowest statewide snowpack ever recorded, even dipping below the previous record low of 1977. Our current snowpack levels were hovering around 49% of the median. Historically, if a winter does not "catch up" by mid-February, the odds of reaching a normal snowpack by April 1st are less than 10%, according to the Utah Avalanche Center. 

Hopefully the abundant snowfall we just received will do better than this! When looking back through written records and tree-ring data (which have been used to track moisture over centuries), the following winters stand out as the most significant "drought years" for Park City and its surrounding area. It all begun in a period from 1896 to 1907. called the "Great Drought", during the era of silver mining in Park City, when none of us were born yet, when we had some very lean winters, when our lush meadows on the high plateaus "turned to dust beds." 

This is considered by climatologists to be the most severe drought since the settlement of Utah. A bad winter happened in 1933–1934 during the Dust Bowl Era. This was before skiing was ingrained as a “popular sport.” That winter saw the lowest winter precipitation year in Utah’s recorded history since statewide tracking began in the late 1800s. 

The Impact was severe; by May 1934, Utah's mountain streams, which peak in spring, reportedly looked like "August trickles." Agriculture around Park City was devastated. This period (1930–1936) represents the most severe multi-year moisture deficit in the state's modern history. 

Then came the winter of 1976–1977, called that of the "Benchmark", often referred to by locals as "the winter that didn't happen." This was long before man-made snow came to the West, so many resorts, including Park City, struggled to open at all before Christmas. 

In November and December 1976, Alta (the regional high-water mark) received only 30.5 inches of snow—the lowest early-season total in modern records until now. The big difference was that 1977 was a "cold drought", freezing but bone-dry. In contrast this 2025-2026 is a "compound drought" because it’s both dry and record-warm, meaning much of what would have been snow fell as rain or melted immediately. 

We had the 2014–2015 called the "Short" Winter that held the record for the lowest total seasonal snowfall at many measuring stations. This luckily happened as we were finishing building our new home and welcomed the sparse snow. 

In Park City, the total snowfall for that season was only 154 inches (the average is closer to 270–300 inches). While following our home’s building progress, I still managed to ski 87 times and descend almost 1,273,955 feet (388,301 meters). 

Finally, we had the 2017–2018 that we call the “Recent Low”, something I can’t hardly remember since it didn’t make a huge dent in my skiing (I skied 108 times and some 1,833,435 feet vertical (558,831 meters)). 

On New Year’s Day 2018, Utah’s statewide Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) was just 3.0 inches. In late December 2025, that record was broken when the SWE dropped to 2.7 inches, cementing this current year as the new "worst on record." 

All this doesn’t tell us how long we’ll keep on receiving snow, but for the moment we got a season’s extension!