Jacques Thomas, 1945-2026

It’s in Nevers, at the Look factory in 1974, that I met Jacques Thomas for the first time. In those days he worked under Eric Chevasson, and was doing promotional work for Look Bindings in the Pacific Northwest region that encompassed Oregon, Washington and Idaho. 

His job was a mixture of shop employee education and on-snow promotions aimed at the skiing public. 

Prior to that, as a kid born in Paris and an avid skier, he first become a ski instructor at Club Med in Switzerland, prior to teaching at Woodstock Suicide Six in Vermont and then moving to Mammoth Mountain in California. 

When Look cut all of its international promotional programs, he went to work for Rossignol skis, in Europe first before ending up on the World Cup circuit and eventually returning to the US where he serviced the World Pro Tour and found a friend in Otto Tschudi. 

That’s how he branched out to become a ski tuner when he settled in Winter Park, Colorado and his tuning and rental ski shop eventually became “Le Feet Lab” in 1998, a boot fitting place where Jacques built a fine reputation as a premier boot-fitter. 

Since I met him, I kept on running into Jacques at ski shows or even in Park City. I also have met him often at Winter Park during my Colorado years from 1999 to 2006. 

More recently he passed the baton to his daughter Jacqueline and began to spend more time fishing in San Carlos, Mexico. The last time we talked on the phone was about one month ago when he turned 81. 

He passed away in Denver following surgery for a pair of aneurysms he had in both knees. He will leave a huge empty and irreplaceable footprint in the ski world in general, and the art of boot fitting in particular.

An easier way to create videos?

Making videos is for sure a hobby of mine that I find frustrating at times because I think it takes too much time to plot a script, get footage, and most importantly edit the whole thing. 

So a short while ago, a former high school friend of mine from France sent me the picture of a very athletic guy with my face pasted upon his, which was accompanied with that caption: "A lion on a leash... The things he'll do to get noticed!…" 

I replied by sending back a photo taken of me two days earlier, after I’d had surgery on my cheek to remove a sarcoma. I added the caption: "Cut the crap, Robert—look what happened to me with your lion!" He didn’t give up and replied, "What is that?… Did your wife bite you???" 

That same evening, I happened to watch a news program featuring that revolutionary new film production process called "EyeTell." It’s an AI-powered desktop studio and video platform created by YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley that lets users write, cast, direct, render, edit, and export AI-generated short-form videos and interactive stories. Never one to be easily defeated, I thought to myself, "Oh boy, hang in there, Robert, I’m coming for you!” 

The next day, after a quick familiarization with the website, I took a minute or two to give EyeTell instructions for a short video script, added these two photos, and sent it all off. It took two or three hours for the system to process the info I’d submitted, and eventually, I had seven short videos telling the story of my alleged mishap with the lion. 

I could have spent more time on the narration, but I blurted it extemporaneously in a single take; then I edited the video and uploaded it to YouTube. That finishing stage took me 10 to 15 minutes. To give you an idea, and a point of comparison, I’ve been producing a year-end video for more than a decade that usually takes me between 65 and 100 hours of work. 

It’s staggering—no, it’s terrifying how, with a good script and the right still photos or videos, I can do everything in an hour (at least 65 times faster). This EyeTell program isn’t meant for the kind of tinkering I do for fun, but for full length feature films. Hollywood has some seriously good reason to worry about AI!

Curiosity and me (Part Two)

For me, curiosity is not a hobby or a passing interest. It’s instead a defining characteristic that has helped make me who I am. I see curiosity as an impulse and a willingness to take risks revealing that my curiosity has sometimes pushed me beyond the comfortable or the prudent. That makes the reflection more compelling than a simple celebration of learning. In a certain way, curiosity is also a refusal to stop growing.

This is, to me, the most powerful idea, as it connects the desire to discover with the desire to remain mentally alive. Further, I see in that trait the enemy of intellectual stagnation. Indeed, it’s very easy to become prisoners of our accumulated knowledge, believing that what we already know is good enough. 

Curiosity challenges that complacency. It reminds us that our experience, however extensive, is always incomplete and has room to grow. It also keeps us young in spirit as we can’t stop the passage of time, but we can influence how we experience it. Every day when we continue to ask questions, explore unfamiliar subjects, and revise old opinions we gain the potential to bring something unexpected. 

Further, curiosity requires a little humility. Perhaps the greatest expression of curiosity is not asking, “How can I prove that I am right?” but rather, “What might I be missing?” That question keeps the door open to learning more from other people, including those whose opinions differ from our own. This also brings a useful distinction: curiosity does not mean pursuing every question or ignoring every boundary. 

Experience and self-knowledge teach us when to explore, when to pause, and when to respect the risks. The challenge is to preserve the appetite for discovery without allowing it to endanger what matters. To conclude our discussion on the subject, I would add this sentence to our reflection, “My curiosity may not always have taken me down the safest roads, but it has kept me from mistaking the road I know for the only road worth taking.” 

This, I think, captures something important about a life shaped by curiosity: the willingness to keep discovering, even after decades of experience...

Curiosity and me (Part One)

Ever since I was born, I seem to have been a curious person. Well, that’s nothing unusual in itself: we are all born curious. But my curiosity has always had an enormous appetite — insatiable, I should say. At times, it has nearly cost me my life as I experimented with dangerous endeavors. 

Yet neither those close calls nor the occasional crossing of boundaries has ever managed to tame that voracious trait of mine. 

Curiosity often carries a negative connotation, as though being curious meant being nosy or meddlesome. But if that happens to be the price I pay for satisfying my thirst for discovery, who really cares? 

Looking back, I believe curiosity has served me remarkably well. It has helped shape the person I am today, with all my flaws and virtues, and I have learned to accept both. In fact, I would go even further: to me, curiosity is one of the measures of how intensely we experience being alive. It keeps us alert, open to new possibilities, and eager to learn. 

Perhaps that is what we call lifelong learning, or even permanent education. Whatever the name, I see no reason to stop as long as there are questions to ask, things to discover, and ideas to challenge. It’s not the first time I write on the subject. In a following blog we’ll delve deeper into the amazing treasure trove curiosity represents. 

Keeping us motivated (Part Two)

For those of us who are older and have accumulated decades of experience, we just have to think back to the times when we were extraordinarily motivated. What were we thinking then? Why did we believe it was possible? What did we tell ourselves? Motivation isn't some mysterious external force that is brand new to us, we already possessed a personal instruction manual for producing it! 

Let’s not interpret the low tide as failure, and this may be the most important secret. As motivation naturally goes up and down, we should never interpret every downturn as "Something is wrong with me," this would add a second problem to the first. Instead, we should just observe "That’s it, the wave is going out. This is part of the cycle," and we won't blame the ocean because the tide is low, but we simply prepare for the next wave and there’s something wonderfully liberating about that perspective. 

It could be that my opening metaphor was a bit misleading, motivation may not actually be a wave that comes and goes, but the wave is the enthusiasm that fuels our motivation. In its deeper sense, our motivation can become something more stable and become a decision about what matters enough to continue doing even when enthusiasm temporarily disappears. 

We could say that it gives us two different engines as enthusiasm will say "I want to do this!" and our commitment continues “I still do this even when I don't particularly feel like it." Finally, the most successful people may not be those who experience the biggest motivational waves, but the ones who have learned to keep moving during the troughs while remaining ready to exploit the peaks.

Even though I cannot surf and would have love to use a ski analogy, this could lead to a rather beautiful formulation for our collection of reflections, “Don't try to live permanently on the crest of the motivational wave. Learn to surf!”

Keeping us motivated (Part One)

For those of us who thrive on motivation just like a toaster needs to be plugged-in, motivation is like a wave, it comes and goes, and when it's moving away from us, it can be tough to experience. So, what are the tricks and secrets for rekindling it? 

Through this metaphor there’s an important distinction that perhaps the secret isn't to keep motivation high, but to know how to catch the next wave—and what to do while the tide is out. Often, we treat motivation as a prerequisite for action, in that motivation leads to action, that in turn leads to results. Yet, in practice, the chain of events frequently works the other way where action leads to progress, progress to satisfaction and then the latter creates motivation.

This reversal may be one of the most useful "secrets" as we shouldn’t wait for the wave. It’s absolutely true that when motivation disappears, our instinct is often to say, "I'll get back to it when I feel motivated again." That's dangerous because motivation can become increasingly distant, and out of sight turns fast into out of mind. 

Instead, it’s a good idea to significantly lower the re-entry threshold by saying "I'll work on it for five minutes" or "I'll only read two pages," the objective isn't to accomplish the task, but just to restart the engine. Quite often, five minutes becomes twenty, but even when it doesn't, we have broken the inertia. Another good trick, when motivation is low, is not to make the goal smaller, but instead lower the starting point. 

Don't say, "I need to exercise", but "I'll first put on my shoes." Our brain has much less resistance to beginning than to committing to a whole project! Yet another trick is to make the activity something you look forward to, like putting on music we love while exercising or pouring a particularly good coffee while writing. 

Also, motivation becomes fragile when an activity turns into an obligation, and we should remind ourselves why we’re doing it. Not the superficial reason—the deeper one. For instance, "I want to learn Spanish" becomes "I want to experience the pleasure of suddenly being able to communicate with all the Latinos in Park City." 

Tomorrow we’ll conclude by digging even deeper into that matter, so please, be there!

Be careful what you wish for!

Over the past weeks, as the mid-term vote approaches, electoral signs have started to invade most Park City front yards. One of them that clearly stands out is non-partisan and cares more about what keeps this community alive: winter snow! 

“Vote Super El Niño" is a lighthearted Ski Utah marketing and community campaign launched ahead of the 2026–27 winter season to unite skiers and snowboarders after a dismal, low-snow previous winter. 

Ski Utah is the state's ski industry trade association led by Nathan Rafferty and its seasonal goal this year is to provide us all with fun, non-partisan relief from political election season by rallying residents and visitors around a shared hope for heavy snowfall. 

This fun campaign coincides with high meteorologic expectations for a strong or "super" El Niño weather pattern in the Pacific, but as we say "Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it", is a popular warning that getting a lot of snow could turn into far too much, just like what happened this summer and continues to happen in Portillo, Chile!