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! 

The danger of feeling twenty-five

We recently discussed the difficulties in downshifting our aggressive activities as we grow old. Right, we still feel like we’re 25 years old and are still filled up with all kinds of crazy plans, strategies and tactics inside our “brand-new” feeling little brain, while the rest of our personal infrastructure is starting to accuse a clear and present decline. 

It often takes an accident, a mishap to make us, or force us to realize that it’s time for us to slow down and disregard our brain's insatiable hunger for exciting action. 

This makes sense, as down-shifting isn’t something we want to sign for, especially while the Olympics and their "Citius, Altius, Fortius" (Faster, Higher, Stronger) motto are part of our daily soundtrack. 

As I believe it now, we should remember that when a door closes, another opens, but that is easier said than accepted! Well, let’s face it, we don’t want to die and before this, get old, so we cling the very best we can to the status quo, in that case a little, sometimes pesky inner voice that tells us “You’re still 25” and of course, we’re too delighted to believe it. 

That’s why sometimes, some of us find themselves in big trouble. Some censorship, at least for false ideas, isn’t that bad after all... 

Tapping into cosmic energy… (Part Three)

To learn more about practical methods to “unclog the pores” and how to cultivate a "porous" state, you’ve arrived at the right place. Well, we’re looking at something very real, without cosmic rays or mystical downloads, but just knowing the inner conditions that make a human mind more permeable, more intuitive, more insightful. When we talk about “unclogging the pores,” we’re describing the process of removing internal noise so that ideas, patterns, and insights can flow more freely. 

Let’s explore practical, grounded methods that genuinely cultivate this “porous” state — the same state that Mozart, Einstein, or Mother Teresa lived in. Let’s begin with “Quieting the Noise”, that is the foundation. We can’t be porous if our mind is jammed with static. A warning, the solutions sound simple but can be very demanding. It’s mindfulness meditation and takes at least 15 minutes daily. It’s not mystical and consists in just training your attention to stop jumping around.

In time, it will reduce our internal chatter, increase awareness of subtle thoughts, and improve emotional clarity, just like rinsing the pores of our skin. It’s demanding because it’s daily and needs to become a habit and it takes time that’s measured in years, not just hours. You’ll know when you get there. It will be where the “porous” state really begins. 

We’re teaching our mind to notice what it normally filters out. We need to cultivate our sense of observation or awe to literally quieten the brain’s self-focus regions and open us to the world through our senses. Following this, we must strengthen our subconscious “receiver”, like tuning a radio. This is where creativity, intuition, and insight emerge. 

We’re not pulling knowledge from the cosmos but we’re allowing our subconscious to surface what it already knows. This includes a period of incubation involving time, thus patience and the ability to let our minds drift among other tools. Then we must work on the emotional component to remove resistance. 

Porosity isn’t just cognitive, it’s emotional. So we start by letting go of perfectionism, choosing curiosity over control and self-compassion, which means that we need to remove the harsh critic that we often are. Finally, we need to use our body as a receiver, keeping in mind that a tense body results in a tense mind. We do this with our breath, where slow, deep breathing increases neural coherence and opens us literally as do light movement and natural immersion. 

This is the physiological version of opening the pores. When all this is achieved and all is aligned, insights feel like they come from “outside,” even though they’re emerging from the deepest layers of your own mind. This is what Mozart meant when he said music appeared “fully formed,” or what Einstein meant by “intuition.” This is what we’re pointing toward when we commit to it. Work smart at it, and good luck!

Tapping into cosmic energy… (Part Two)

We could say that the forces of our universe work in unison with the way our brain works. Our brain is constantly absorbing patterns, forming associations, recombining ideas, generating insights, noticing subtle cues and making leaps that feel sudden, but are built on years of subconscious processing. When our mind is quiet and receptive, these processes become more visible and feel like “inspiration arriving out of nowhere.” 

In fact, it’s not coming from outside, it’s inside, but it feels cosmic because it originates from a domain so vast that we can’t fully fathom it. If we aren’t as “porous” as Mozart or Einstein, the keys to let that universal wisdom rush in, can be found in mindfulness, the best “unclogging” mechanism that includes meditation, stillness, and even awe.

Mindfulness help reduce internal noise, increases neural coherence, improves attention, quiets the default mode network (especially the “self-chatter” region), enhances creativity, increases sensitivity to subtle patterns and improves emotional clarity. This is the mental equivalent of “opening up the pores.” Unlike what I might have thought or said before, we’re not absorbing cosmic energy by the cubic foot, we’re just removing the blockages that prevent our own mind from functioning at its highest capacity. 

In fact, Mozart and Einstein weren’t cosmic antennas but were both uncluttered minds. Amadeus Mozart described music as “already complete” in his mind, as if he were discovering it rather than inventing it. Albert Einstein said his ideas came as “intuitive leaps,” not logical steps. Their descriptions match what happens when the subconscious is highly active, the conscious mind gets out of the way, the person is deeply attuned to patterns, the internal critic shuts up or is at least quiet, the mind is in a state of flow. 

This feels like receiving something from beyond ourselves, but it’s really a measure of the mind functioning at its most open and integrated. I find this approach to be a modern, secular version of a very old idea where the insight comes not from force, but from receptivity. We are not looking at magic but mental permeability, that is the ability to let the world, ideas, patterns, and inspiration flow through us without resistance. 

It’s not mystical, it’s simply wisdom. This approach, I believe is not only coherent, it actually grasp a procedure that has existed for millennia and sees cosmic or universal energy as something that penetrates us to help us grow while clearing all the internal noises that make our lives so hard to live. 

If you don’t have the “porosity” of the famous folks we talked about and want to know how to get it, just stay tuned for the next episode...

Tapping into cosmic energy… (Part One)

The entire universe is immense and contains an almost unlimited amount of energy. So my thinking has always been “Why not tap a tiny bit of that energy, to help us when we need it and make our lives easier both from physical to a mental standpoint?” In fact, without a clear and definite answer to my question, I had intuitively believed it was possible. 

I thought it could happen by opening up, body and mind, and immerse ourselves into that unlimited sea of knowledge and power, just pulling the tiny bit we need of its immense content. How does this strike you? Perhaps what I’m saying here is actually more common, and more profound than people will admit. To me, “cosmic or universal energy” is not literally a physical substance like some parcels delivered by Amazon. 

Instead, it’s a permeable model, as if we were immersed into vast substance, and our degree of openness would determines what we received and perceived. This could mirror a view held by a limited few that have thought already about this. What I’m trying to define is a real psychological phenomenon. Not a few magical cosmic rays, nor a literal energy transfer, but something far more subtle and far more powerful. Something that would make our mind becomes more creative, insightful, and perceptive when it’s open, quiet, and receptive. 

This is not mysticism either. It’s more like neuroscience, psychology, and lived experience. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Albert Einstein, and many others didn’t “receive” knowledge from the universe like a computer downloads a new update, but by cultivating a mental state that allowed ideas to emerge to their attention with unusual clarity and fluency. This in fact is the mechanism I want to discuss and try to explain. 

For instance, Trump stands at the opposite end of this spectrum of awareness, by remaining totally impenetrable untouched by the forces of the universe. “Porous to the cosmos” could be a metaphor for the cognitive openness I’m trying to explain. This means a heightened pattern recognition, a deeper intuition, the ability to hold complex ideas lightly and keep a mind that doesn’t fight or resist insights. 

That also implies a nervous system that isn’t cluttered with noise and a capacity to easily “go with the flow”. These are measurable traits that have nothing supernatural about them. They’re just psychological and neurological and can be cultivated. We are in fact immersed in a “sea of knowledge” and it’s up to us to let it soak in or work at improving our own “porosity”. 

Tomorrow, I’ll share with you what really goes inside the process of opening up the pores...

Dialing down to last longer… (Part Two)

As we continue aging, we also need to build more predictability into our activities as accidents often come from surprises due to terrain, weather, fatigue, traffic, or other people. We’ll be safer if we choose conditions we know we can handle well, like avoiding crowded days or knowing when to stop before we’re tired. It’s not fear, it’s simply strategy. 

Let’s not neglect good equipment that can compensate for aging reflexes and stability. For instance, better helmets, goggles, bindings, and skis well tuned. Cars with advanced driver-assist features, reverse view screen, or bikes with disk brakes and all the modern accessories. We should also train for stability, not just strength, as with age, our biggest accident risks come from slower reaction time, reduced balance and reduced ability to correct a mistake.

These measures don’t just make us safer, they make you feel younger. We must be willing to listen to our bodies “whispers” before they become “shouts”, as our body never fails to give us early warnings long before it breaks down. What I mean are slight hesitation, a moment of imbalance, a sense of being “off”, a little stiffness or a tiny lapse in focus. 

When we were young, we could ignore these, older we shouldn’t. We also need to redefine what “risk” means. It’s not just the chance of injury, but it’s losing the ability to keep doing what we love. This doesn’t mean that, as BB King sings “The thrill is gone”, as we don’t need to eliminate excitement, simply just recalibrate it. 

Like skiing groomers more often now instead of fighting the trees or drive spiritedly on the open roads, not in heavy traffic, cycle hard on familiar paths, not unpredictable ones. Reframe aging as an evolution, not a decline. The most active older people aren’t the ones who fight aging; they’re the ones who adapt to it. Let’s stay curious, disciplined, and self-aware. 

We don’t stop moving, we just adapt the way we move. With this said, Lindsey Vonn’s unfortunate fall at the Olympics wasn’t in vain, but she delivered a strong teaching moment to all of us who still believe we’re 25 but are no longer there...

Dialing down to last longer… (Part One)

A few days ago, following Lindsey Vonn’s accident a the Olympics, I felt grateful to her for reminding me that, as we age, we must slow down or at least control our expectations when it come to performance. From that indisputable reality, I wonder how does highly active and competitive persons can dial down the personal risk they take, and the effort they make as they age, so they don't get into trouble or are exposed to the kind of bad accidents generally linked to an advancing age?

It’s absolutely true that the years don’t totally erase an active person’s identity, they simply affects the rate of certain risks. The real challenge is psychological. Our instincts, confidence, and appetite for intensity stay young, while our reactions like time, balance, and recovery quietly and inexorably shift. 

The trick is not to stop living boldly, but to adapt the way we take risks, so we stay in the game instead of getting sidelined by preventable accidents. As we age, brute force and split‑second reactions become less reliable but, smoothness, skill, precision, and planning become our new superpowers. For instance, when I get on the hill to ski, this new paradigm pushes me to control my boards even more effortlessly with cleaner lines instead of pushing maximum speed. 

When I drive my car, I focus infinitely more, pay as much attention as I can, I’m much more courteous, patient and in all cases, I’m not doing less, and whatever I do is much smarter. In my vocabulary and mind’s eye, I’m replacing “proving myself” with “preserving myself”. 

Younger people often push limits to test themselves. Older folks push limits to stay alive and active for decades. This should make us say: “I’m not here to win the day — I’m here to win the next 20 years!” Such a mindset naturally reduces unnecessary risk-taking. Tomorrow, we’ll add a few more crucial tools to our quiver, so come back for more!