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!