Where was my mentor when I needed one?

Like many folks, I guess, I would have love to have a series of mentors throughout my life, showing me the ins and outs of navigating my path without wasting opportunities. 

This wasn’t totally the case, if I except Monsieur Losserand, my grade school teacher who discovered at least one talent in me and helped me nurture it. 

I also think that I was in very good company, with a great number of buddies who were sharing that same predicament. So without crying over spilled milk, what does this tell me and the rest of us?

Quite simply that we ought to look for opportunities to mentor young people whenever we can. Sure, that’s a lot easier said than done, but it’s definitely something to keep in the front of our minds, while we last...

Ski trail reconnaissance

If you take your family, friends or clients skiing if you are an instructor or a guide, you owe it to him and yourself, to precisely know where you are taking them. 

This simple precaution will prevent a lot of headaches, bad feeling and many accidents. Don’t just follow any track! 

That’s become a rule whenever I decide to take a family member who skis with me in places that are unknown to them and far from routine to them and myself. 

I only wish I had made a habit of it long before now. I check the area first, figure out suitable lines or itinerary where I’ll be able to guide them with minimum apprehension on their part and well within their technical abilities.

This is not only meant to help folks you’re in charge of, but also yourself, as there always are some valuable teaching moments in observing and thinking through a place that might be complex or unfamiliar...

When I used to hate physical education

When I was a kid in junior-high, physical education was very basic, not to say crude. I remember three things we had to do: Run, high-jump and rope-climb. 

These were the tests that determined a young person fitness or lack thereof. I couldn’t run because I got side-stitch, I couldn’t high-jump or rope-climb because my efforts were grossly uncoordinated and no one, among my teachers, had the imagination to try to coach and correct me. 

For these failures, I was labeled as incompetent and was so humiliated that I came to hate physical ed and considered myself a failure in sports. 

Talk about bad self-image that my PE instructors kept on drilling on me, without even trying to address my personal understanding of what I was supposed to do. 

It’s only when I was in high school that, one day, we went to climb a nearby hill called Mont Chevran, around the small city of Cluses, France, where almost miraculously, as I finally was back in my natural element, I was first of my class to make it to the top. 

I finally broke the spell of being a klutz and it finally opened the door to a rather physically active rest of my life.

The challenge of skiing one’s age…

I just skied my age for this season; 73 days out and I’m just 73! I had a great time, the snow was perfect and I did some of my favorite runs for the first time this season.

While this was easy enough, it required my skiing almost everyday when conditions were decent, so as I’m moving in age, I’m beginning to get concerned. There’s a point in a non-so distant future when this silly practice will become a big challenge. 

Can you imagine a 100 year old having to ski 100 times in a season? Better remain in tip-top shape? This is also while I don’t think it’s such a good idea to extend life beyond what’s considered “normal” these days. 

I would not want to have to live to be 150 years old and have to ski as many days, especially as the planet is warming fast and snow is bound to disappear even faster!

Trumps stunning numbers are in!

A couple days ago, the United States broke the 500,000 death from Covid-19, a lasting testimony of Trumps terrible crisis-management skills. 

Okay, I won’t mention the Belgians, Brits and Spaniards that have scored even worse than us. Granted, George W. Bush had 500,000 Iraqis killed because of his ill-conceived war, but these were foreigners, and to be fair to the Donald, he wasn’t able to do as bad in terms of total human toll. 

We can only say that he’s responsible for a good 300,000 of our domestic pandemic deaths, if we were to compare us to Canada, and logically assume that our neighbor to the North is culturally and economically comparable to our Great Country. 

Of course, we’re not trying to compare us to Germany, in which case, Trumps personal liability would jump to over 400,000 deaths; that’s a lot of blood on our ex-dictator “small hands”. 

Too bad too few folks in the media remind us of that horrible reality...

My life’s big regret

If I’m lucky to have very few regrets, I have one that’s enormous. It’s been not to have kept a journal from the day I was able to write and still remembered enough of my early life when I didn’t know how to put it down to paper. 

I always try to remember things, but they seem to be drifting farther and farther away, to the point that I often make a conscious effort to committing them to writing them down now, while there still is a figment of freshness and truth to them! 

Since around 2007, I have begun recording the daily facts and moods of my life and unfortunately, if I had kept much tighter and certain memories starting from that point on, the preceding ones have, and are still fading away, victim of the corrosive effect to time. 

There is no question that as years pass, memories become much duller except for those triggered by huge emotional upheavals, and still, these get corrupted too with the passage of time. 

So, if I have an advice to give to anyone, it’s to start keeping a journal today, no matter what your age and stage in life are, and organize whatever represents your memories so you can retrieve them before there’s no good storage room left in your overcrowded brain!

Ski racing and me…

I have not been watching any alpine ski race for beginning to end this winter as I had in the recent past. Perhaps, this is because we had no American World Cup events because of Covid-19, but also because there was no major, dominant champion to warrant my attention. 

For years, I was not much of a regular watcher of ski competitions. About 10 years ago, Miller, Ligety, Vonn and Shiffrin got me more interested, as well as Richard, a French skier from my hometown valley, and got me to become a more regular spectator again. 

When I could – because of a 8 hour time difference - I continued with sporadically watching the dual Hirscher-Kristofferson and Shiffrin dominant seasons, then this winter, I’ve only read the results and watched a few single runs by the day’s winner or some spectacular falls or save, like France’s Muzaton, and that was it.

Is my reaction a bit chauvinistic? Probably so. This said, I saved a lot of time, given the repetitive and uniform nature of ski racing, don’t feel to have missed much and will probably continue curtailing my ski racing screen time in future seasons!

Farewell, Rush Limbaugh!

I never liked Limbaugh’s big mouth and infectious malevolence. When I learned about his passing, I was relieved to see another American-well poisoner out of service forever. 

He certainly helped normalize the unacceptable Trump behavior, tone and deeds. Is there a Hell to welcome him as his last refuge?

I doubt it very much because I don’t believe in that after-life institution, but if there were, it would be proper to move him deep into that locale’s basement forever and ever. 

Wherever happens to you, Rush, thanks for leaving!

 

Time wasted on lifts while skiing…

If you ski a lot, are at least an advanced skier, you soon realize that there’s often more time spent riding lift than actually skiing. 

Based on my own observations, the time I spend on lifts is between two-third to three-quarter of my total time spent on the mountain, depending on the speed of the lift, without accounting for any lift stoppage, waiting in line, food or bathroom stops. 

At the end of the outing, all this “dead-time” can literally play havoc on one’s actual skiing time. So when skiers spends five hours on the mountain, this might leave them with only one to two hours of actual gliding down the slopes. 

With so much time left sitting on a chairlift, what can we do is try to fill up that dead-time, fumble with our smartphone, make sure we get a decent signal, watch for the top station coming on too fast, drop a glove or a pole in the process, and get even more aggravated…

Short of hiring a helicopter service at the risk of blowing up one’s carbon footprint, skiing remains a pretty inefficient way to recreate, at least for someone like me who values time so much!

A lifetime of encounters...

The other night I was thinking about all the people I’ve me over the years, the ones that I have forgotten, those I don’t care for, the few I remain in contact with, and the very, very few I still call my friends. 

The crowd is big and at times overwhelming. It’s not because my lifetime, so far, spans on two continents, schooling, many different jobs, projects, or several careers, hobbies and activities of all kinds, that I know more people than most, but still, the list is big. 

It has also certainly contributed to making me what I’ve become today, by challenging me, teaching me and encouraging me along the way.

This initial mental exercise became so captivating and so involved that I’ve decided to somehow put it into a writing form and see what conclusions I can draw from it. 

This appeals to me as a project, the results will certainly surprise me as well as teach me a lot, and I’ll let you know later about my conclusions!

Dialing-up my grandson’s skiing…

Last week, while I was skiing with my grandson, I wanted him to get acquainted with my favorite descent into the trees known under the name of “Condor Woods”, in the Canyons area of Park City. 

This area is one of these that I call “schizophrenic”. It’s smack into the woods, on steep terrain, and everything there is meant to get your full attention, all the time, but the frosting on the cake, so to speak, is that it ends with a long creek-bed that creates a natural half-pipe, meandering like a bowel, building up speed, with no side escape whatsoever until the end. 

This latter section, is particularly tricky and filled with blind curves that could hide snowboarders sitting there and taking a break or some fallen skier in dire straight. 

During the couple of days we skied together we skied it seven time in its three marked itineraries. My grandson handled it beautifully and enjoyed it even more!

What makes people sticking to Trump?

My wife often wonder why Trump voter don’t see that the former president has done nothing for them, and I respond, “That’s doesn’t matter, they still love him!” My reason for saying this, is that Trump (or more appropriately, Steve Bannon and company) understood one essential element: Scapegoating.

He and his team identified two areas that could be built relentlessly into society’s scapegoats: The Democratic (aka socio-communist) party and the Media (Fox New and a few select “others” excepted) and it worked beautifully. 

People were miserable and not successful because of bad luck or because they were simply stupid or lazy, it was now because of these two evil forces, removing the proverbial monkey off their back. In fact, it’s a lot easier to convince folks to be against something than in favor of anything. 

I sure did work, and why wouldn’t it because it’s so much easier to blame a third party for one’s unhappiness than one’s own fault!

Gnarly skiing in old Avoriaz

These days, as I spend a lot of time skiing the trees, especially when it snows often like now, I can’t help but remember my youth in Avoriaz, France, as a ski instructor some fifty years ago. 

I already loved the “gnarly” stuff, like “Les Grillages”, the “Couloir du Président”, the “Cables”, the “Combette” or even “Les Grands Sutes”. 

This was the winter of 1971, with not many clients yet, but plenty of wonderful personal skiing time. These trails or itineraries I should say, planted the seed for the ski that I love today and that the Park City region is filled with. 

I know that today, what I held in my memory as an iconic couloir, the “Président”, used to slide down logging is no more, as it’s been all re-vegetated, but it still live in my memory with its tightness, it steepness and it’s non-stop run...

Are you sometimes scared on skis?

These days, my grandson is making huge progress with his skiing and while we were riding the chairlift, I said to you him: “You don’t look scared at all on steep slopes...” He interrupted me saying: “Yes, I do!” 

This got me thinking and I remembered a time I was scared on skis. It took me back to the spring of 2000, when I skied Les Grands Montets, near Chamonix, in the company of my nephew Yves and one of his friends, both were in their early twenties while I was well into my fifties. 

They took me to some hairy place that really scared me because I had skis too long for the circumstances, didn’t know and wasn’t prepared for the spot they wanted to take me down, and a simple fall would have ended my life on the spot. 

Since that time, I can’t recall being scared or even nervous, no matter how steep or tricky the place I'm skiing is. 

Did that event change my view of my own safety on snow? I can’t say for sure, but one essential thing I’ve done ever since, though, was whatever fear I could harbor is instantly replaced by a tight, unyielding concentration, and that specific frame of mind appears to have forever eliminated any reluctance I could feel on two boards!

Tree skiing and control

Skiing the trees can be super fun, especially on days when the weather or visibility are bad and when it’s snowing and blowing hard. 

Then, in that sheltered environment, especially if the terrain is steep, obstacles (trees, stumps, rocks) come super fast on the skier and skiing well requires a combination of high-level concentration, creative line planning, fast moves and constant control. 

The latter is extremely important as skiing the trees is rarely a “first-track” situation. In most cases they can be already many tracks, fast rounded ruts and a uniformly accelerated pace that lead to loss of control. 

That implies that there is no stop-and-go skiing, and as the name of the game implies, an interrupted series of turn during the whole run. That’s the way I still can strive to ski and the way I’m doing it when I’m skiing alone. 

The reason I bring the subject up, is that as I’m growing older I’m not as quick as I once was, and need to bring more control to my skiing, returning forward more completely, faster, and keeping up with the rhythm I’d like to maintain. 

This might translate on average into a slower pace, but that’s precisely what I must work on. 

Finally, if I’ve lost you with my convoluted comments, just ignore that blog!

Feeding our future with vision

Just like our bodies, our future must be continuously fed with a road-map that we create as we move along. 

That’s right, we need to continually dream, envision and set up the stage for what comes next, no matter how old or demotivated we are to do so.

It comes down to filling up the pipeline and making damned sure that it’s always ready with the seeds of events we want to see bloom. 

When we are young, we have dreams, projects, aspirations, but as we grow older these plans for the future begin to dry up and bring us to the brink of saying: “We’ve got nothing to look forward to anymore...” 

Sad, isn’t it? So the idea of “Feeding Our Future” (FOF) is as crystal clear as it’s simple, we need to constantly nourish the beast. 

The reality is that it’s more difficult to plan and more complicated to implement than it always appear! 

This is just a basic concept. More about it soon...

A long weekend with my grandson

Yesterday, my 12 year old grandson came to spend five days with us, and of course he’ll be skiing a lot with his grandpa. 

We expect lots of new snow, so this should be a terrific long weekend. 

Yesterday, we skied a lot on some gnarly terrain, ended up hiking on some slopes, and we plan to continue the next four days. 

We simply hope that the ski runs we'll go to won’t be too crowded during this popular February weekend… 

What a privilege to ski with a young skier filled with enthusiasm, vitality and an open-mind. 

Hopefully, all that positive energy will spill on me!

Ligety says goodbye to ski racing

At age 36, it was only a matter of time until Ted Ligety decide to quit racing and focus on his young family and his “Shred” business. 

Champions come and go, but Ligety has a track record that remains impressive as he marked World Cup with his innovative technique, his dominance of giant slalom for years, and a solid 15 year career with the US ski team. 

Just as a reminder his results speak for themselves: 

•  Two Olympic gold medals Seven World Championship medals including five gold.
• A string of three-straight World Championship GS gold medals – a feat never before accomplished! 
• Six small World Cup crystal globes (five GS, one combined).
• 25 World Cup wins, 52 podiums in 336 starts.

Happy and productive retirement, Ted! 

Also, don’t forget to fully enjoy your beautiful family and appreciate Park City will offer you during all your years of retirement from competitive skiing!

The avalanche quandary

Is there a science behind understanding what causes avalanche? Perhaps, but that’s not all that’s necessary to avoid getting caught into one, in my opinion. 

Then, is there an art in not getting caught into one? Yes, and that one’s called pure luck. 

With already two casualties this season in Park City, 21 in the United States and on Monday a 45 years old, famous Italian mountain climber Carlo Alberto Cimenti, who got caught and died in another avalanche in Sestriere, I would say that there’s only one good method for surviving such a fate, it’s plenty of good common sense, extreme prudence and still a good modicum of good luck. 

Another one, of course, is to avoiding playing in the back-country. All the other good reasons for trying to justify the hapless victims of most avalanche unfortunately don’t wash and shouldn’t be considered part of a reliable road map before embarking into some unknown mass of snow… 

The forever little boy in me…

There’s a huge, mischievous part of me, that’s from my boyhood days, that keeps my forward-looking, curious and always ready to embark on new adventures of all sorts. 

It’s a spirit that I like, that renews itself and remains always fresh and bubbly. 

Is it my inside engine, my constant drive? I’d say yes and the more I notch years along the long path of my life, I cherish him more than ever before and want to keep him, fresh and energized along my side for the rest of my ride...

Trump, America’s exhaust pipe

I heard on the radio how about profoundly divided families were over Trump and Trumpism. 

That caused me to think that the reasons of Trump’s appeal, among “deplorable” folks that still support him, is that he gave them total agency to accomplish, think and validate terrible deeds, like storming the Capitol and trying to kill member of Congress, lying egregiously, finding truth in conspiracy theories and being racist among other misdeeds. 

“My president told me it was okay to act like this” being the umbrella excuse for misbehaving and following dictator Trump’s orders. 

In society, morality, religion, laws, taboos and accepted order keep people from going haywire and it took a Donald Trump to tap into these repressed outlawed or nefarious tendencies among the general population.

A population that defines democracy by being solely surrounded by individuals who think or act like themselves and most importantly resemble them. That’s why Trump, in my view, is our country’s exhaust pipe, a highly toxic one at that, and in a more physiological way, acts more like America’s anus.

Park City après-ski traffic nightmare

Friday saw a severe blizzard all over Park City, so I decided to stay close to home and drive to Park City Mountain (5 minutes away) for my afternoon skiing. 

It snowed hard all day, and when I got to the parking lot, I noticed more traffic than usual, plus the mess created by all that new snow, but was lucky enough to get a spot. 

Skiing was fabulous, there were huge crowds for a Friday, but I managed to ski in places where lines remained to a minimum. A superb day of fresh powder skiing, wind blowing and often time, zero-visibility, but that’s the way I love it. 

Following my wife recommendation, I wore my Descente long coat and stayed warm all day.

Returning to the car at 4:15 pm painted a different picture. 

It was total gridlock. Impossible to get out from the resort center and in spite of my seasoned bag of tricks I was stuck in place like the rest of the skiers and it took me a solid hour to get home, not to mention that when I got there, I had to clear a path for my car to get into the garage. 

There were cars everywhere, with California, Texas and tons of out-of-state plates. Covid-19 must create a special pent-up demand for skiing and this must be part the price we have to pay for our town notoriety!

Updated role-models

As we become much older, it’s not a bad idea to evolve our role models. 

My personal view is that I can relate much better now to older people as they’re able to show me the way into the last chapters of my life. This is why I become more interested how people my age, and older, are staying alive, managing their lives and making the very best out of the precious time they’ve left. 

I figure that I might glean a few good ideas that will help make my latter days on this planet more fun, productive and fulfilling. Sure, when we take the time to look for it, there are many excellent, older role models to follow. 

I can think of two of them at the moment; as you might expect, both are ski industry figures before anything else.

Émile Allais, from Megève, France, is one of them, he died in 2012 at age 100 and the other one is Klaus Obermeyer who just celebrated his 101st birthday last December. Both of them loved what they did, the mountains and skiing of course. 

They skied late in life, Allais was 90 when he broke his shoulder in a collision with a snowboarder, but didn’t give up, kept on skiing after recovering into his late 90s. 

As for Obermeyer, he said, on his 100th birthday, that he still skied and added that for him, skiing was now easier than walking!

Life-force and toasters

I have always seen us, humans, as a toasters line-up, all plugged in and therefore, well alive and functioning. The electric power that give them life and function is not different from what we call “life-force” of “Chi” as described as far as ancient China.

Called “ki” in Japan and “gi” in Korea, that same life-force refers to the flow of energy that fuels all living things like plants, humans and animals. It’s in fact the closest thing to the air we breathe and that we know so well as we experience it daily. 

Chi isn’t new and goes back to Taoism and the 5th century BC. In my personal philosophy the melding of our physical body and mind is also like the hardware and random-access-memory of a computer or smart-phone, that just needs to powered on by some electric current or the life-force, without which there’s no life. 

As you can understand that leaves little room for some concept of “after-life”...

The dangers of snow removal

It’s not uncommon that snow removal issues provoke conflicts between people. That happened to me several years ago with my next-door neighbor, and has been a recurring issue ever since. 

A few days ago, he ended up blowing his snow into my driveway. I called him up on it, and he came to fix the problem, shoveling what what his snow off my property.

It wasn’t as bad as what happened this Monday near Scranton, Pennsylvania, when a couple was shoveling their snow into their neighbor property.

The latter got mad, killed the couple and killed himself shortly after that. A pretty onerous conflict resolution for a few cubic feet of snow. 

I hope my own neighbor behaves more nicely, or better yet, stop pushing his snow into my home!

My new take on ski instructing

When I was a ski instructor I was overly technical and often didn’t heed enough the social and “warm-and-fuzzy” aspirations of my clients enough. 

Before anything, skiing was mechanical and technical, and even though I was passionate about the sport, I mostly saw the need for technical betterment with my clients. This, just to say that I could have – in retrospect – done much better with my ski-instructor career. 

Today, my client list has changed a lot. For one thing, it has shrunk tremendously, it’s now just my immediate family. I also share my knowledge and accompaniment for free with these individuals. And yet, I’ve also become a much better service provider for them. 

I solely focus on their enjoyment. Not much technique, if at all. Just the most appropriate choice of terrain and paths and the best possible skiing. That’s it! Don’t we all change, given enough time?

Park City buses and Covid-19

Sunday was a blue-bird day with beautiful snow, and guess what? Skiers invaded Park City like I had never seen before. 

I went out at 12:45 pm to ski with my grandson for the afternoon, and after struggling for 20 minutes dodging huge SUV moving in all directions inside an overstuffed parking lot, and searching, just like me, for a parking spot, I decided to go the High School weekend parking overflow and from there catch a bus to the ski resort. 

What a great call this was! Skiing was superb and we had a wonderful time. The only downside was on the returning trip from the resort to the parking lot, we were squeezed like sardines in a non-ventilated bus.

People did wear their masks but the air was stale and there were just too many folks piled up inside the vehicle. I just prayed we didn’t have a super-spreader Covid passenger inside and I envied the real and lowly sardines; at least, they can’t catch the coronavirus!

Aging skiers must soldier on…

If that older person sliding on boards still want to have fun, everything must absolutely become more economical in their movements and must become as “subtle” as he or she can manage. 

This is not a new concept to me. With age comes the crying need for the utmost economy of physical strength that implies not only to evolve like a feather on snow, but also avoid falling down as much as possible (“at any cost” would be highly desirable but remain a “stretch!”). 

Ever so softly, the older skier must keep on pushing the envelope and if pushing feels out of the question, it must at the very least keep it as it is, and never accept going into reverse. 

Finally, the older skier must never acknowledge defeat, and should events turn bad or unpleasant, he or she should do it again, as a way to exorcise the event, so the door never closes. 

With this good, solid advice from someone who literally is in your ski boots, enjoy the rest of your winter skiing!