Weather predictions for next winter…

The latest outlook from the NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center just came out and covers pretty much the upcoming snow season including January, February and March 2027. 

It shows a recognizable El Niño pattern beginning to emerge with wetter conditions across much of the southern United States, drier weather across portions of the northern Rockies and increased odds of above-normal temperatures across large sections of the country.

These maps do not predict exact snowfall totals or individual winter storms. However, they provide what should be a good early indication of where the storm track may favor wetter, drier, warmer or cooler conditions during the 2026–2027 winter. 

As far as Park City is concerned you can see it for yourself: Temperatures trending higher and precipitation the same as normal. We’ll see, as always time will tell, and come early April, we’ll compare predictions against realities to see if any came close to what NOAA predicted….

Too much of a good thing

Portillo, the Chilean ski resort was supposed to open for skiing on June 27. It couldn’t as snow was not there on time. It did the weekend later with snow making on its Plateau ski runs, but on July 14 the access road was closed as a massive snowstorm began on Wednesday, July 15, 2026.

Over 5 meters (16+ feet) of total snow has piled up across the resort area since the system hit. Ski Portillo has remained closed and isolated due to the high volume of snow and safety precautions. 

Unofficial local forecasts and resort communications suggest that the closure could realistically impact travel until the first few days of August 2026. The Chilean Highway Department and Guardia Vieja local authorities manage Route 60 (the highway to Portillo). 

Clearing the road will require an immense amount of time to dig through the deep snowpack, clear stranded freight trucks, and complete extensive avalanche mitigation work. 

Ski Portillo's management said that once a safe weather window finally opens, they will first attempt to transport stranded guests to and from the resort via helicopter before the highway is fully cleared for public vehicles. 

While some central Chilean resorts like Valle Nevado have managed restricted 4x4-only openings for residents and staff with bookings, the severe high-mountain corridor leading to Portillo remains strictly impassable. 

Be careful of what you wish for!

Making it look easy is so hard!

Recently, I enjoyed watching an interview of this year’s Alpine ski world cup winners Mikaela Shiffrin and Marco Odermatt. This talk, meant to be a podcast, was conducted by Nick Fellows, the official FIS interviewer. In it, Mikaela said that when people watched her they felt that her skiing looked seemingly easy and effortless, but it was in fact real hard work and no one wanted to realize it. I have to agree. 

What she meant is one of those deceptively simple truths that only makes sense if we’ve lived inside a craft long enough to feel the gap between how mastery looks and what it costs. Since I’m so immersed into skiing, her comment resonates at a deeper level than she even intended. Here’s what I would add, not to correct her, but to expand the idea into something more complete and more honest about high‑level performance. 

When skiing looks “easy,” it’s because the skier has spent thousands of hours removing friction, noise, hesitation, and micro‑errors. In turn, when we watch the skier, we only see fluidity, balance, inevitability and grace. But what we can’t see are the thousands of invisible corrections per minute, a nervous system trained to anticipate chaos, a body that has experienced every type of failure and a mind that has learned to stay quiet under pressure. 

In fact, effortlessness is not the absence of effort but it is its full integration. In fact, for whatever we’re good at doing, the better we get, the more invisible the inner details of our work becomes. This is the paradox of mastery where beginners show their effort, experts hide it and masters erase it. In my example, Shiffrin and Odermatt ski in a way that makes our brain relax when we watch them, but inside their bodies, the workload is enormous, with edge control at an infinitely small level, pressure management that changes every fraction of a second and a constant recalibration of line, timing, and snow feedback. 

We see what happens on the surface, but Marco and Mikaela live the turbulence beneath it. That is when all assume: “She’s gifted. He’s gifted. It must be easy for them.” Yet, talent is real, but it’s only the ignition, what we don’t see is the relentless, boring, repetitive, lonely work that turns talent into inevitability. Mastery requires a relationship with discomfort that very few people ever develop. This is the part Mikaela didn’t say out loud, but it’s the truth, as most of us don’t want to realize how hard it is because they don’t want to imagine choosing that level of discomfort. 

Finally, mastery is lonely and this is the part people rarely talk about. The higher one’s climb, the fewer people can truly understand what they’re doing, so when Mikaela says people don’t want to realize how hard it is, she’s also saying: “Most people can’t imagine the world I live in.” And she’s right. 

A revised view of the winter season

Just a few extra observations: 

I have lived through three snow droughts during my short life and my 72 seasons of skiing: First in 1963-1964 in France, then in the West during the 1976-1977 season while I was still living in New York and finally this 2025-2026 winter season. What’s my take-away? 

For one thing, a winter with little or no snow is totally demoralizing. It makes you feel things like: “Will a normal winter ever return?” It casts doubt on the future of skiing and closes the door to a positive outlook. Sure, we feel the exact opposite of folks in New England, in Europe or Hokkaidō that enjoyed a wonderful snow season, but we’re woefully unable to feel their glee… 

Of course, in the context of what goes on in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, Sudan and Ukraine, these considerations are trivial... 

At the same time we all know that everything is cyclical and good, average and we try to remind ourselves that bad situations come and go, just like good and mediocre ones, so there ‘s hope that better ones will eventually return, but we’ll have to keep in mind that great, normal and worse are hooked on the same cycle. 

Finally, there’s no way we can remove the sobering element, the “elephant in the room” that climate change is. This horrible trend not only isn’t going away, but is likely going to deepen, make greatness less likely, normalcy not so good, while exceptional years will become rarer and terrible circumstances start trending as the norm. 

Did I forget anything?

Lessons learned from another ski season…

Another ski season is now over, so it’s time to conduct the annual debriefing and find out what I learned as a skier and more importantly as a human being through the turns I’ve made. 

This season stood out for its lack of snow and its subsequent shortness all over the Western US. That’s mostly why skiing looked to be more of a chore than a thrilling experience, but still, I forced myself to go and discover new ways to have fun in a universe of scarcity and keep on learning new things and skills by “pushing the envelope” in the direction of doing “difficult things”. 

When advanced skiers were skiing like beginners as the conditions got extremely tough, I did my very best to stay graceful and nimble on my pair of boards and make something out of nothing, or if you prefer “turning lemons into lemonade”. I learned a few new tricks like using the edge of a run creatively to work my way down an overcrowded spot by passing folks in places they wouldn’t go, using speed defensively and also cutting my way into slush, ice or other heavy types of snow. 

In more than one way I discovered adaptation this season. First, to my advancing age, skiing perhaps less in terms of hours and vertical, but much more efficiently in the ways I expanded my energy into my skiing, in restraining my temerity and also avoiding potentially bad situations which resulted in almost no fall except for one single one in a terrible mogul, without any negative outcome. I learned to do more with less and return home satisfied. 

On the subject of satisfaction, I loved my new Nordica rear-entry boots, although they weren’t perfect but still made a huge difference in getting in and out of them. A few things should be done to them to tweak them into greater perfection, but that will be for another time. There was also the comfort provided by the new covered parking garage at the Canyons Village that made struggling into mud a thing of the past. 

At 78, I learned more about advancing in age and accepting change, particularly when some younger and stronger skiers happened to pass me and leave me in the dust. I was still happy with myself and saw one door closing as another one opened up. Overall and in spite of some weaker muscles I did all the difficult skiing I used to do in previous years and I was pleased with my 72nd winter season. I also was grateful to have done what so many my age, and even younger, can no longer do. 

I’m aiming at doing much, much better next year, snow and weather helping!

The end of a forgettable ski season

Last Friday was for me the end of the most forgettable ski season in my entire life. The good snow never really came and for the first time ever, I had to literally force myself to go out and hit the slopes. My skis got regularly ruined so I had to work many times to fix them, and except for two or three good times, skiing was just terrible.

The times I skied (58) and the quantity of ski I logged 662,611 vertical feet (201 294 vertical meters) was similar to what I did 25 years ago when I was still working and a quarter of what I achieved 3 years ago (admittedly, I’m older, but still) ...

This is not to say that I didn’t try hard. I did my very best to ski the best I could in conditions that were the worst ever, but over me and inside my head, I couldn’t remove the specter that this season was a sample of the shape of things to come in a changing world of warming climate. 

That is, as I like to say, “The woolly Mammoth in the room” that no one wants to even acknowledge and hear about, shrugging one bad season off and forcing themselves to believe that next year will be much better. Oh, how much do I wish these folks were right!

Skiing north of Hell…

In the past couple of days, I made a distinct effort to go skiing to really see how the conditions were like at Park City Mountain. On Sunday, I skied the Park City side and had some good runs around the Thaynes chairlift, and on Monday decided to check out the Canyons side and was disappointed when I realized that Ninety-nine-90 had just been shut down for avalanche danger. 

Disappointed I returned home, skiing to some of the worst slush snow ever experienced. This was almost hell, that’s why I called this episode “Slightly north of hell!” Frankly, I feel terrible for our visitors that had to ski in such terrible conditions. I looked at the Ski Utah calendar and saw that Park City was still planning to stay open for skiing until April 20, just to beat its Deer Valley neighbor by one day (it plans to shut down on April 19).

The best I can guess is that skiing will be on virtual snow (at least in Park City, that spreads the artificial white stuff as thin as it can to save money!) I also noticed that Snowbasin, out of respect for its ski patrons, already closed on April 22. 

On my last chair ride that day, I chatted with an older Indian gentleman who, based on the current conditions, thought that he wasn’t seeing much more than 5 more years of skiing in Park City, adding that “When the earth will be doomed, there will be voices saying that it took only 2,000 years for the human specie to destroy the planet… What a shame!”

Icing on the Park City cake!

Last Sunday afternoon, I skied – I should say ice-skated, most of the Park City Mountain ski runs, with my daughter and we were lucky on many counts. Not to hit a tree, fall and slide without ever stopping as we glided, most of the time on sheer ice. 

Think of it as “on a wing and a prayer!” Something so bad I never experienced in 72 ski seasons, the world over from Australia to Zermatt! 

That should say a lot. Blue ice was visible in numerous spots and everywhere, including on bumps, everything was smooth, but super hard, the kind of material never letting the edges bite. 

Only on flat sections had the traffic abraded snow enough to turn it into some kind of semolina, making “skating” more pleasant. 

Since the combination of noise and vibrations was extremely unnerving, we did our very best to be “brief” and not linger on the harder spots, which gave anyone who watched us the very false impression that we were quite “at ease” on this forsaken terrain. 

Anecdotally, I’ve always thought and said that skiing on ice demanded brevity and I stand by that principle! In fact, we were just terrified and rushing to put an end to our descents. This said, we stuck on the mountain till closing time and tried everything that was available to find better spots, but they weren’t available. 

At the day’s conclusion, we felt good like the survivors we had become...

Doing great stuff with limited resources…

This thin and snow-less season will have taught me a very important lesson. It’s always possible to have a whole lot of fun with limited resources. Quantity has very little to do with quality in fact. It’s all in the way we direct the spotlight to see the good, the potential and improve on what seems bad at first sight. In short, a complete change in perspective! 

A few days ago, I was skiing on what’s always been for me, and still is today, ma favorite slope around Park City, called “Thaynes” and served by a rickety, 1975 Yan double fixed-grip chair that gets you 876 feet (267 m) higher up in just over 6 minutes. 

An ideal slope profile for a slalom course! 

The picture doesn’t do justice to the difficult, highly technical run it serves. I’ve written many times about that place and still love it in spite of its ski lift being very long in the teeth! 

Sharp eye and sure footing…

When I heard we had received eight inches of powder overnight, I figured this new day was offering me an unexpected gift. Since I couldn’t get out in the morning, I set my sights on the afternoon, convinced that higher elevation would still hold the fluffiest snow. 

From the lift, everything looked promising—soft, untouched, inviting. But the moment my skis touched the surface, the illusion vanished. What had looked like powder had turned into heavy plaster, the kind that grabs your skis and makes every turn feel like a negotiation. I left that area and tried another, only to find the same stubborn, uncooperative snow. 

Still, something in me switched from disappointment to curiosity. Instead of fighting the conditions, I treated them like a game. And little by little, I found ways to make it fun. The challenge itself became the reward. That’s when it struck me: all these years on snow have built a catalog of sensations that live in the soles of my feet—tiny variations in pressure, edge angle, and balance that I don’t consciously think about but rely on constantly. 

My eyes, too, have been trained by thousands of runs to read terrain instantly, to spot both opportunity and danger long before I reach them. In difficult conditions, those two systems—vision and foot‑feel—start talking to each other. My feet recognize echoes of past situations and quietly offer solutions. My eyes scan ahead and choose the line that gives those solutions the best chance to work. When they sync up, even terrible snow becomes a kind of game. 

The frustration dissolves, replaced by a sense of competence, presence, and flow. And that’s when I’m reminded, once again, that there’s really no such thing as a bad moment on skis. There are only different moments—each one adding another layer to the skill, memory, and joy that keep me coming back.

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...

Why older skiers can’t get back up? (Part Two)

Besides what we covered yesterday, aging also affects the inner ear, joint receptors, and neural pathways that tell us where we’re in space. This makes it harder to coordinate the “roll, plant, push” sequence needed to stand up on snow. 

Balance decline is one of the major contributors to fall‑related difficulty in older adults. On flat terrain, where gravity can’t help us, this deficit becomes even more obvious. Even strong older athletes experience slower reaction times and reduced “explosive” force, like that quick impulse needed to rise from the ground. 

This isn’t just muscle mass; it’s the nervous system firing more slowly and less efficiently. As we age, knees, hips, and spine lose flexibility and range of motion. Getting up from a fall requires hip rotation, knee and ankle flexion and the ability to bring the torso over the center of mass. Our ski boots lock the ankles, so the hips and knees must do even more work in the exact places where stiffness tends to accumulate. 

Then there’s fear as older adults often hesitate to do what they remember doing because they’re subconsciously protecting joints or worried about falling again. This “mental brake” or apprehension, reduces the fluidity needed to stand up efficiently. 

Ski instructors who work with older clients emphasize that getting up with skis attached is dramatically harder unless the slope is steep enough to help position the hips above the feet. On flat terrain, people get stuck and the only way out of a fall is to release the bindings and take off the skis.

Heli‑ski operators know this, which is why they often restrict older skiers, not because they are not good enough to ski, but because they may not be able to self‑recover after a fall in deep snow and will unnecessarily hold the group. 

So the obvious conclusion of this quick discussion is to avoid falling and if this still happens remember that we’re goddamn lucky to still ski as septuagenarians or even older!

Why older skiers can’t get back up? (Part one)

After the age of 70, skiers increasingly find it quite difficult to get back up after a fall, especially on flat terrain. This is so bad that ski helicopter operators discourage, or simply disallow older skiers from boarding their aircraft. 

Besides a drastic reduction in overall loss of muscle mass, we’ll see today what’s really behind that disability. Obviously, the answer turns out to be more complex than “less muscle.” Muscle loss matters, but it’s only one piece of a larger age‑related shift in how the body moves, stabilizes itself, and generates coordinated force. 

Research on older adults and fall recovery points to several interacting factors that make getting up from the ground, especially with ski boots on, on snow, and with skis attached, disproportionately difficult after about age 70. Standing up from the ground requires a sequence of movements that many of us simply stop practicing as we grow older. 

Physical therapists will tell us that rising from the ground demands hip mobility, core engagement, shoulder stability, and rotational control, all of which decline with age even in active adults. Ski boots and skis amplify this problem: they restrict ankle flexion, limit leverage, and make it impossible to plant the feet under the body the way younger skiers instinctively do. 

So what we’re up against in that case is a combination of reduced mobility, weaker balance, reduced neuromuscular response, less self-confidence and a ski gear that literally stands in the way. Muscle loss is only one contributor, so tomorrow we’ll try to get the whole picture!

Skiing with family or friends

Any time I ski with family and friends, my old ski instructor background and attitudes come to the fore. Here I am literally putting myself on the skis of my guests as long as they are a tad less proficient than myself, which, it seems to me, at least, continues to be the case. I pick runs and conditions that I feel are best adapted to them and that they will thoroughly enjoy in perfect safety.

As much as humanly possible, I always preselect the itinerary I chose beforehand to make sure it’s appropriate. This is my top priority. When we stop, I ask them how they do, if they’re hot or feel too cold, tired or are having any problem, if their equipment works okay for them and if everything feels great. 

As I precede them and ski down the mountain I turn my head around and look behind me as regularly as I can to make sure they’re still following and see how they’re doing. By doing so my enjoyment shifts from a personal one to a much greater, richer one as their welfare, safety and own enjoyment takes precedence over my little person. 

Call this the pleasure of sharing what I love, pleasing those I value, the true joy of giving!

Unorthodox ski boot testing

Last Sunday, I was still unsettled with my new Nordica rear-entry boots that I felt I needed to push their assessment a tad farther. During my active career in the ski industry, I’ve been in charge of marketing ski boots and that activity, as well as my ski background, took me testing boots on many occasions as well. In the process, I became keenly aware of testing methods (and their highly subjective nature) as well as assiduously scrutinizing test results, mostly those of ski publications. 

Today, I realized that the way we’ve been testing boots all along was pretty much flawed, in the way we neglected “direct comparison” when we evaluated different pairs of boots. We would put on a pair of boots A and then boots B, C, etc. and try to remember how A, B and C compared to each other. Remembering sensations is extremely hard, if not impossible that way.

That’s perhaps why, the Saturday before I did that new test, I got an insight that the way to test a pair of ski boots was to put on foot into A and the other one into B (the sole lengths being identical and requiring no binding adjustment), and this is exactly what I did the next day. When I hit the slopes no one even noticed that I had two different boots on. 

As soon as I was on the chairlift I could compare the pressure point locations on either foot, with a weighted or unweighted boot, and the same went on as I initiated turns, carved or just skidded my turns. Very soon I could feel the difference which, to my surprise, was just located around the ankle bones, a frequent occurrence with brand new boots that had not yet “nested” the bones protrusions. 

Yet, I was impressed by the excellent skiability of this new rear-entry boot that I could clearly sense and judge on the hard packed portions of my runs. In fact, what makes this rear-entry so good technically is its amazing heel purchase. On that subject and as I had previously noticed, entry was not that easy as the heel had to clear a sill of sorts that let the heel move back inside a well designed heel pocket that held it in place remarkably well while skiing. 

Again, this boot's secret weapon! That secured heel position was also what made getting out of that boot not that easy as the heel had to clear the heel pocket and demanded a specific effort for it. This was more a disappointment with the product than anything else as I precisely bought the boots to facilitate their exit at the end of a ski outing. 

In spite of it, at the end of the afternoon, I was still sold on my new boots and impressed with my direct comparison method and feedback I got from testing one different boot on each foot!

Taking my Nordicas out for a spin…

As I let you know in August, I finally got myself a pair of rear-entry Nordica boots, in order to ease my multiple entries and exit into ski boots, but, until now, I was hesitant to take them on snow in order to test them. 

I had bought them a bit tight and, at first, had difficulties getting in and out of them, a task I rehearsed daily for a good week to ten days this summer. Finally, this past Friday, I felt ready to take my act on the snow, and not only did I dare do it, but I took this untested footwear over my favorite and more challenging area in all of Park City, the “Ninety-90” hill! 

Getting into the boot was okay, but not that easy as I had to wiggle my heel securely in place by forcing it out and seating it securely over a sort of "sill" that hugged it in place. 

I also didn’t fine tune the upper closure as I should have. 

I felt some gaping space all afternoon between the top of the tongue and the spoiler, but the weather was so cold that I didn’t muster the courage to fine tune the adjustments. 

This is something I’ll progressively adjust over time as I familiarize myself with the new boots. I also misaligned the tongue on my right boot which created a pressure point as I was skiing. The forefoot buckles should have been set tighter too, but again, live and learn! 

Skiability of these new boots was pretty good and didn’t impede my skiing in less than perfect snow conditions with big bumps and deep snow getting denser. Heel hold was remarkable for a rear-entry! This said, I’m hopeful that I’ll make these boots work for me. One thing for sure is that even with that day, low temperature (24 degrees) getting out of the boot proved to be a lot more easier!