Easier said than done, you might say, but yet, this is the most enriching way of dealing with adversity.
As the saying goes: “What doesn’t kill you will make you stronger” and think of all the tricks, teachings, discoveries and added experience you’ll add to your quiver and all the formidable strength you’ll pick in overcoming these realities that stood on your way to challenge you!
A few days ago, I received an evaluation questionnaire from Vail Resorts and these are my answers...
How likely are you to recommend Park City to a friend, colleague, or family member?
PCM must deliver on its (Epic) promise and find staff even if it takes $18, $20 or $25/hr wage. This is thievery pure and simple.
Tell us if there's anything else you would like us to know about your experience at Park City?
Lots of things are not right. Flooding its ski areas with 2.1 million passes sold, was the harbinger of a chaotic season Vail Resorts (VR) chose to ignore, which says a lot about the incompetence of its top management.
VR should not have purchased a large ski resort like PCM if it was woefully unable to operate it properly as it as showed this current season. I recognize that the weather didn’t cooperate early on, but PCM didn’t try too hard to catch up with large snow-making efforts when the temperatures dropped.
Not opening Thaynes, Sun Peak and Dreamscape is beyond the pale and shows that the PCM is run by technocrats and not skiers. Same comment applies to the insane lines for downloading at the Canyons Gondola and Over and Out chair.
• No more Kleenex tissues at the (now long) lift lines
• No more heat on OBX
• No one to park cars on parking lots so more visitors can find a spot (ski Deer Valley to find out how they do it).
• Many, many lifts interruption, plus disquieting noises on some lines or chairs; is there a widespread differed maintenance issue?
• Slopes peppered with rock (Mercury, Another World) without any intervention to remove those (yeah, they probably have to be hand-picked!).
• Big drop in Staff friendliness (hence lack of proper training).
VR’s focus on safety is also misplaced. Safety isn’t just loading, riding and unloading from lifts, it’s getting rid of dangerous whippers on ski run, fallen trees in which branches skiers can impale themselves, getting rid of rolling pebbles off runs that can all cause accidents and are real nuisances. VR is in the business of selling quality experience first, then money will follow.
By prioritizing profits over its customer experience, the company is sawing off the branch it’s sitting on. I’ll stop there. VR and PCM are going to the dogs, period.
Sure Henrik isn’t your run-of-the-mill racer when it comes to sponsorship agreements. Remember when he sued his own ski federation for the right to having his own lucrative helmet sponsorship deal with Red Bull instead of Telnor that was negotiated for everyone on the team.
So my question is, why is Kristoffersen getting away from mounting Markers on his skis instead of Look?
Premature release?
Can someone tell me the real ins and outs of that story?
Like many people around my age, I dislike the deteriorating quality of my sleep and miss the long, uninterrupted nights of rest that I always found too short when I was younger.
For almost a decade now, my bed time is not as sound as it used to be and is generally affected by a series of dreams that wake me up fully or partially. In the past I hardly ever noticed or remembered any dream.
What bothers me is that the vast majority of my dreams are nightmares and are totally unlike my life, my current concerns, or situations I currently encounter, which all are for the overwhelming part are totally positive.
Well, I guess that my good dreams (I suspect I still have some) get filtered out and are so mild, weak or soft that they won’t wake me up. If that’s not the case, I might have to seek some professional help to try to understand what these bad dream come from and what they mean.
By the way, how is your daily dream’s menu? Are they as harassing as mine?
It seems that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has a romance going on with dictators.
From Putin to Xi or even Belarus’ Lukashenko, the world sport organization doesn’t spend too much time analyzing which regime to support as long as it can bid for its Games and bring money in.
In a few days, at the Beijing winter Olympics, human right will be one more elephant in the room and the fear for being arrested or otherwise punished will dissuade crusader to stand against Xi’s oppressive regime.
While the Olympic Charter is centered on athletic achievements, patriotism, world peace and collaboration, it might be time to revise it and included human rights as well. No institution is sheltered from change and must walk – it seems – in harmony with an evolving society and evolving values.
The international spotlight of hosting the Games and t he authority of the IOC should be enough to motivate some political and social change, that would among other things inspire compliance and respect of international human rights law.
...keeps on losing weight and getting thinner. In the 2022 edition of the Century Link phone book that I just received there are only 26 pages of residential listings and 94 for pages of business or “Yellow Page” listings.
This is down from the previous issue and I would anticipate, much fatter than the next one.
By the way, I still wonder why individuals are still using the traditional phone company and haven’t moved to voice over IP and save some serious money by the same token.
Change is hard to some people. We adopted that technology more than 15 years ago...
This past Saturday, I learned that my friend and brother-in-law Xavier had passed away a week earlier from what seemed to be Covid-19. From what I was able to gather, he was vaccinated.
Two years later, I found him as a ski instructor member of the Avoriaz ski school where he had just begun teaching the year before. Since we already know each other, we became good friends.
Xavier had just married Paule, my future wife’s sister and they both had settled in an old multi-family house near the Morzine suspended pedestrian bridge.
Xavier was a bit aloof, perhaps self-centered or may be both, but still I liked the guy.
Later on, I met my wife thanks to that relationship, and we were closely involved during the strife that opposed half of the ski school to each others.
We both had a hard time finding a counter-seasonal job, and eventually, just like me, Xavier threw the towel and took a job as big-box retail store manager in the Champagne region of France.
In the early 90s some family arguments about heritage harmed the relationship and we stopped having a normal relationship...
The more I think and learn about religion in general, the more I wonder what holds it together and I come to the conclusion that “faithful” relate much more to the tribal, communal and ritual aspects of religions than its theological basis.
The spiritual part is of course the weakest part of the religious edifice, as it is for the most part, totally irrational and impossible to prove.
This is a place where members of religion don’t venture very far because nothing really makes sense to them, and if they dig deeper, risk negating what they know in terms of their factual and pragmatic experience of life.
They tend to leave the theological part to the “experts”, in other words, their leaders who are free to tell them whatever they want.
When put under the microscope, the real story behind religion doesn’t hold much credence and explain why members of religion don’t choose to venture there and stick quietly and obediently to the tangible, ritual portion of religion and the tribal support it represents for them...
In my backyard there’s that tall pine tree that recently got its top bent out of shape.
I can’t remember what caused it, whether it was wind, snow or some other weather related incident.
Yet, it found a way to grow its next leader perfectly vertically. Depending on how one observes it, it look a little bit like a crank.
Yeah, a cranky old tree! Isn’t it wonderful how some adversity can affect a personality through a creative twist like this one.
When things are tough, unforeseen or unpleasant, think of that tree and work or invent a new, noticeable way out of it!
When I drive to ski Park City, Canyons side, its front parking row is almost completely dedicated to “handicapped parking” and is always full, which suggest that it must be occupied by skiers with some disabilities, right?
Well, not quite. Every time I looked at people driving or coming out of these cars, with very few exceptions, they seemed to be as mobile and able as I was, even more in many cases, unless they were, and that could very well be the case, mentally retarded.
On the photo below, the driver of the blue car, already inside, looked perfectly mobile when she slipped into her car, while the couple by the white auto looked perfectly alright too…
All this is highly disgusting of course and I’m wondering if there were a God watching, high above, what would happen to these cheaters. Alas, there’s no God and an endless herd of hypocrites on this earth!
This a recurring subject for me, as I have covered it in 2011 and 2015 in that blog.
In recent years, the use of snowplow for learning to ski has been largely demonized by some who claim that it’s a weak position from a bio-mechanical standpoints, which, they say, is ineffective at slowing, stopping or steering.
These folks claim that better alternatives exist when the skis are kept parallel, as the snowplow works only on flat terrain and very slow speeds, and the hockey-stop should be preferred. What they forget of course is that beginner skiers can’t afford (mostly mentally) to go fast enough to produce a hockey-stop.
So, as far as I’m concerned, snowplow is a valid teaching technique that should leave place to parallel skiing when the skier is familiarized with speed. Yet, it should remain in one’s tool-box when circumstances demand it.
I was reminded about it once more, when I watch the famous Wengen ski races a few days ago. I don’t know if you too have watched some of the Lauberhorn downhill races in Wengen, Switzerland, last weekend and have noticed how some top flight ski racers are still using the good old “snowplow”, aka “wedge” or “pizza” to slow down their speed just before the Kernen-S turn.
Other racers did a more stylish, wiggly turn, but my personal experience as well as my ski DNA says that nothing beats a solid snowplow when speed reduction is needed. I don’t care about the purists that sneeze at a second-natured wedge or pizza when circumstance demand it.
After all its part and parcel of a strong skier toolbox. A strong, energetic snowplow is to skiing what disc brakes are to motorized driving, compared to yesteryear drum brakes!
...What would you change? As we say: “Good question...”
I would answer: “It would depends; like what tools I have at my disposal in terms of education, information sources and experience.
If these are as limited as what I had at my disposal at each step of my life, probably not much in the way my life would become would be different.
If I did have or know even a fraction of what’s available to me today, however, everything would be totally changed!”
Now, ask yourself the exact same question and imagine what you’d answer?
If your response is much different than mine, I’d be very curious to know...
Intuitively, I’ve always believed that any form of effort, like work or discipline in everything we do, will act as an antidote to future suffering. How true and verified is that approach, I can tell for certain, but I’m convinced that it works like, say, most natural laws of nature.
Sure, I’m not necessarily talking about unimaginable circumstances that lead to suffering, but very probable and likely ones. Like for instance, being hit with a huge, unforeseen expense. The pain linked to that situation can be lessen by systematically saving in view of the possibility of some “rainy day”.
Another can example can be found in taking good care of our body in order to avoid bad medical outcomes down the road, or working hard at school in order to get an enjoyable and comfortable career.
Do you see what I mean? You do the suffering first under the form of discipline, sacrifice and arduous work and you suffer less later on.
...Can be a predictor of their skills on the snow, or not?
This is an age old question to which I believe I have a personal and pretty educated answer. In my opinion, skiers who carry their skis with their tips pointing towards the rear, as opposed to the front, are generally not so good on snow.
Why in the world can I make such a bold and partial statement, could you think? The answer is disarming clear and simple:
This therefore imply that they’ve learned the sport themselves and are not very observant either of the way other skiers handle themselves on and off the slopes.
To me, this a telltale sign that they’re not yet proficient in that sport and still a stand a long way to becoming good skiers.
“Point your tips forward” might be a good first step in order to getting better on skis!
When I ski with my grandson and take him to places that are a bit hairy, I feel very responsible and, understandably apprehensive.
I should rather say, hesitating to take the plunge, into the well covered, but quite sleek Machete couloir.
There is no huge danger if one falls, but it could be a long, tumbling slide and I didn’t want that kind of experience on my grandson!
At first, I wanted to shoot a video of my grandson descent, but I quickly relented and accompanied him instead.
All went well, and he impeccably made it down the chute. Next time, we shoot a clip!
After using them 21 times, my new Nordicas are history.
Having been in the boot business for a long time, starting in 1982, I knew these incident happened, often for no particular reasons.
The problem is called “Environmental Stress Cracking” (ESC) and covers unexpected brittle failure of thermoplastic polymers. In fact, such stress cracking is defined as "an external or internal crack in a plastic caused by tensile stresses less than its short-term mechanical strength".
Technical considerations aside, this puts me in a bad situation as I need to return the cracked shell to the retailer, that in turn will ship it to Nordica in New England and get a replacement shell back.
This will take more than a month, and in the meantime, what am I supposed to do? A nice customer service dilemma.
If you have suggestions, I’d love to hear them?
Late December our 7 year old GE clothes dryer died after few years of use and little work accomplished. Another example of today’s appliances durability.
During the first two years we owned that appliance, GE Appliances was part of this all-American industrial behemoth, based in Louisville, Kentucky, that was purchased by the Chinese multinational home appliances company Haier in 2016.
Hopefully, the Chinese might improve the dependability and longevity of the GE product. So, we went to Home Depot after checking Consumer Reports on dryers and found that, overwhelmingly, LG was rated the best in that category.
On Friday another team came to assess the damage and confirm there was a problem. Just to accommodate the 2 visits, we had to modify our plans and when we discovered that the Friday team didn’t bring the replacement unit we were promised, I went to Home Depot to cancel the purchase, and ordered an LG instead of a Maytag that was dead on arrival.
The cancellation process was long and arduous and took me two hours, some time most working folks don’t have at their disposal. We finally got what we wanted. Next time, don’t let salespeople who know less than you do make you switch to a brand they’ve been told to push by their bosses!
Each day, during my morning meditation, I take the time to mentally scan my body from head to toes, and in the vast majority of instances, all is well.
I feel good, healthy, pain-free and I am very, very grateful. I then realize that I have absolutely no right to complain and that in spite of my age and my dwindling physical strength, I’m still fortunate.
True, many of my friends are either dead, suffering, convalescing or having a lot of health issues that are making their daily lives miserable. I’m incredibly privileged and can begin the day with an incredible head-start.
Wow!
On Tuesday, I convinced my wife to go skiing. It was a cold but beautiful day and the big reason for her to go was that the mountain was now crowd-free after the holidays.
We had a good few runs until we started noticing that many of the ski trails weren’t groomed as they normally are, with big bumps, slippery patches here and there, even on gentler slopes. This was far from being what we had experienced for the last twenty years, at least.
One could have argued that there was little man-made snow and, as a result, regular grooming by snow cat becomes more difficult. We had started at Park City Mountain (PCM) and moved over to the Canyons side of the mountain.
Since grooming was so bad on the regular runs, we followed the main circulation arteries that were kept smooth enough, had a great run on Boa’s powder (the Condor lift had opened that day) and when it was time to return back to PCM, we thought we’d jump on the “Orange Bubble” chair, but it was stopped.
We turned around, walked to the gondola instead when the chairlift started again, so we went there, loaded it and stopped shortly thereafter for a long time, then it sputtered again and, nothing, it just stopped.
Long minutes went by, and we soon realized we wouldn’t make it back to our car as the QuickSilver gondola would be closed.
Once more the chairlift moved, but backwards (scarry!) and stopped again until the operators decided to use the backup engine to empty the line.
Morality, slopes and lift maintenance could also need some help at our local Vail Resorts ski area and this doesn’t bode well for our future skiing enjoyment...
Hey, wait a minute, what’s a vision board? Well, according to specialists, a vision board is a physical collection of items such as pictures, magazine clippings, words, and quotes that can be displayed to visually affirm one’s goals and dreams.
If you prefer it’s a cool name for a goal board or dream board that is there to stimulate the power of visualization.
The basic question becomes: Do I need to build such a tool? I will answer by the negative as I know two or three priorities I have to address in the very short-term and can do it without adding a tool for it.
I’ll therefore postpone the building of my own vision board to a later date...
To my surprise, the tourists are gone and the mountain is ours again.
Yesterday, I returned to Jupiter in order to recon Park City Mountain in anticipation to skiing with my grandson during the upcoming, long weekend of Martin Luther King.
It was fun to return to some much quieter slopes with fewer skiers in sight. I rediscovered half of the mountain that I had ignored up until now, and I even motivated myself to hike to the top of Jupiter Peak and ski down Machete couloir.
Bluebird day, snow a bit on the hard side, but a great time out!
Yesterday, we brushed a picture representing the ideal mountain ski resort. Now, contrast this idealized picture with the one offered today by big conglomerates like Vail Resorts, that are promoting traffic jams, lift-lines, unmet expectations, terrible communication and there’s suddenly a huge disconnect.
Their product has turned into a lackluster consumable commodity, not a special, uplifting experience as it should have. Skiing should be like an Apple or a Tesla branded thing. It should be an experience, not just a product or a service.
Tesla and Apple product faults or flaws are largely erased by the superlative quality of the experience they are able to deliver. There absolutely no question that in products like in services, experience should be the shining element that overwhelms everything else.
With its approach, the quality of the experience is erased by a tsunami of misery coming from all sides, like over-flooding its slopes with skiers, creating excess traffic, poor service, lack of communication and irresponsible decisions.
There are lots of areas where economies of scale from a slow, inflexible cookie-cutter made website, to a proprietary pass scanning system, or too many old and inefficient lifts like those still found in Park City are hampering Vail Resorts productivity and responsiveness.
These regimented economies of scale are hurting a company’s flexibility and tying the hands of its local management. It seems that Alterra was more sensitive in keeping the traits of each one of its resort more distinctive in not blending them uniformly together.
From an outside and cynical observer standpoint, it would even seem that Vail Resorts’ management is now squeezing its product every which way, as soon as possible, to produce more dollars, just before global warming makes it business model fully irrelevant…
Skiing is before anything else, an experience. For many skiers who visit from a different setting or climate, it should be a transformative experience. There’s the cold, the snow, the scenic mountains and a special culture that should make all the difference.
Ski town’s folks ought to be different and hopefully nicer, vehicular traffic shouldn’t be the nightmare it is in the cities, the pace ought to be slower, each moment should be easier, fun and everything should feel different, much like a Christmas postcard, if you see what I mean.
These are curved balls that are thrown at us, as part of living and we better accommodate to them.
Another element that’s crucial and even more difficult to manage, is for the ski resorts executive to research, imagine and deliver on what their customers want and that is a tough challenge as well as a moving target.
It’s much easier though than invent an i-Phone or a Tesla automobile, but even with incremental creativity, reality proved that it’s not easy or that ski executive are not a very imaginative bunch.
In the next blog, we’ll see how one of them (yeah, Vail Resorts) fails deliver on its “Epic Promise” to paraphrase the company’s motto...
Yesterday first looked overcast, gray, rather warm and uninviting, but I had heard that Jupiter had just opened for the season, so I decided to drive to the Park City parking lot in order to check it out.
When I got there, there wasn’t one spot free to park my car, so I turned around and drove to Canyons instead.
There, after finding a parking spot on an ice sheet, instead of catching the gondola to cross back over to Park City, I stuck around at 9990 where the snow wasn’t bad, just a tad chunky and difficult to ski, which I didn’t dislike.
Furthermore, I’m convinced that this one-of-a-kind tumble has perked me up through the end of 2022!
To conclude the day, I then went down “DesChutes”, “Silver Horse” and called it an afternoon, clocking another 20,000 feet vertical!
As often, when we get out and ski, a grim day can turn into a super-charged fun and event-filled experience!
Two day ago, my friend Dirk and I met and ski together in order to celebrate his birthday, but also to reminisce on the 12th anniversary of our record breaking vertical record at Deer Valley (112,750 vertical feet in one day).
Nothing of the sort was on the agenda that day, just to ski the delightful powder that was accumulating and waiting for us all over the resort.
True story.
As we returned from our morning walk, as I was removing my shoes, the door bell rang, I opened and someone looking like a Pacific Islander asked me if I needed any work on my trees.
Since I wasn’t ready or in the mood to consider this kind of work in the middle of winter with snow piled all around my house, I declined but invited him to leave his card with me “just in case…”
In truth, the last time I looked, I couldn’t see any banana, banyan, coconut or jacaranda trees on my property, just far too many aspen and pine trees!
In the past days, I haven’t been in great form on my skis. My turns feel sometime less secure, I find it more difficult to control my skis in rough terrain, and it seems also harder to keep skiing non-stop for a full run without feeling my legs hurting.
Sure, I have my explanations: flat light, hard snow to ski on, a momentary lull. In reality, is this just a temporary funk or is physical decline making itself noticed? I’m not quite sure, but I’ve decided to pay more attention as the days progress.
For the time being lets say that the jury is out…
This new year has been particularly cold in Park City with temperatures down to -5 F some mornings. So, a few days ago, when I turned on our gas fireplace and it didn’t start, I was disappointed, and even though the heat was on, the added warmth provided by the fireplace as well as its flames are a cheering sight when outside temperatures are so low.
So I looked closer and found out that the pilot light was out. I opened up the compartment, took the instruction book out, and restarted the flame, but when I hit the switch there was still no fire roaring.
I check on YouTube and the rest of the Internet to find out that perhaps the inside of the fireplace was dirty. That fireplace was put in service when we built our home eight years ago! I then proceeded to take of the glass plate off, removed the fake logs and engage into a thorough vacuuming and cleaning of the entire insert.
When I though all was done to my satisfaction, I re-installed the whole assembly, and as I lit the pilot and tested again, there was no flames to be seen. I dismounted the whole insert again and thoroughly cleaned up the thermocouple to make sure it was free of soot and reset the whole fireplace, to alas, no positive result.
That’s when I decided that I would call the fireplace supplier (Alpine Fireplaces in Lehi, Utah) after the holiday weekend. We were on New Year’s day and I thought of taking a look at the supplier’s website and let them know about my problem so they could put me on top of their list the following Monday. I got in the chat room and said that I owned a fireplace installed in 2014 and when I turned on the switch, the fire failed to ignite, yet the pilot light worked, and ask them to come over and fix the problem as soon as possible.
One hour and 45 minutes later, on that same New Year’s day when everyone is supposed to be hung-over, do nothing and is half-asleep in front of the TV, I received an answer that said: “A couple of easy things to check. One, is the valve still in the pilot position? Common mistake, this lets the pilot operate but wont let the fireplace ignite. Make sure the valve is turned to the on position. Two, the switch on the wall that turns the fireplace on, may need replaced. This is a millivolt system and will not shock you, you can easily take the switch off the wall and take the two wires and touch them together, if they ignite the fireplace, replace the switch. Let me know what you find”, signed, Bruce Broadbent, CMO.
What I learned from that story was that Bruce is an outstanding executive who knows what extraordinary customer service is, and that the incident gave the opportunity to effect a long overdue deep-clean of my gas fireplace insert from top to bottom!
On New Year’s day, I received a “recycled” email from someone whom I use to respect a whole lot when he was a business associate of mine, and might have since become a die-hard “Trumpist” through Covid-19, or god forbid, his true inbred stupidity waiting to bloom.
To make a long story short, it extolled the legalistic and argumentative trait that he attributes to Democrats, in the way they live their lives and make everyone in society miserable, to the wholesomeness, goodness and sobriety of the Republican Party that he seems to adore (see illustration).
Ciao!
Back in September of 2021, we purchased our season ski passes from Vail Resort expecting a normal product and a good service delivery. In fact, the same product with have purchased for years. We trusted the company.
Granted, winter came late, November was very warm and didn’t able the resort to make as much snow as usual, but these were justifiable problems that we fully understood. Then the snow came, better than last year as the Christmas Holidays began, and even much better during the busiest week of New Year.
The problem not acknowledged was the lack of staff to run the lifts and possibly additional crucial mountain services too. The base salary at Park City Mountain (PCM) being only $15 per hour, it’s no longer competitive in view of the local cost of living.
To attract the staff it needs, PCM should pay much more, but is far too stingy to do this. The lack of terrain and lifts open are compounded with the fact that Vail Resorts sold this season 2.1 million pre-purchased tickets and season passes. That’s a 76% increase over the 2019-20 season.
Vail Resorts and PCM got the money early from their clients, but failed to staff accordingly and failed on its “Epic Promise”. Because of it, the lines have never been so long creating a recurrent, daily “skimageddon”, and yet no apology, no regards for the client and no decent and true explanation.
The fact that there are few employee able and willing to work for $15 per hour is not my problem and therefore PCM failed its guest by not delivering the product it was supposed to, because it didn’t want to damage its profitability.
This is simply theft, especially when Vail Resorts has taken money from dissatisfied clients! Vail Resorts greed will be its undoing.
I’m one of these lucky people who can celebrate their birthday pretty close to the new year and both blend perfectly well!
Some pity me for having two important events so close that they fear they’ll take away from each other, when in fact they create the opposite, synergistic effect.
A new year is indeed a blank page or a slab of granite that’s waiting to receive personal marks on it, and it’s with the excitement the opportunity deserves that I look at it.
Then, I feel privileged to have arrived at that advanced age and still be alive and healthy enough to appreciate it. Not everyone is given that chance!
When I look back, I have traveled an impressive number of years that used to be considered very old not so long ago. Then, it gets really exciting when I can dream of what I’ll achieve during that new year.
There’s my new year resolution, of course, and then plenty of positive and productive things I want to add to it, as well as keeping all the good and productive elements I have been able to build into my life along the way.
Finally, I’ll continue to appreciate the incredible privilege I was given to participate in life on this planet and each time there is difficulty, pain or sorrow in my life I will enthusiastically turn it into a challenge I can sink my teeth into.
I wish you exactly the same in this happy and exciting new year!
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