Skiing

By now I’ve been skiing 7 times in the last 30 years, the most recent trip being last weekend.  Here are my thoughts on the issue.

 Trips 1 & 2.  1980-81 (?).  These were school ski trips from my school, Marymount, Paris, to Saas Fee, in Switzerland (upper right).  I went with my brother.  This started me out.  Before the trip, we had a huge list of things we had to get: ski pants, jacket, gloves, goggles, thermal underwear, and “apres-ski” boots, which look like big moon boots and were difficult to find – I drove my parents nuts looking all through Paris for these damn things. 

            We got there by overnight train.  Once there, we stayed in a ski chalet about 15 minutes from the slopes.  They had various après-ski activities, of which the ones I remember most were a fondue (cheese & bread), movies featuring the Powder Hound (whoever he was) and a “dutch auction”.  Each trip lasted about a week.

            This is where I first learned to ski:  how to put on the boots, how to put the boots into the skis, how to fold the skis together when not being used, and the basic technique of snow-plowing.  Saas Fee was one of these “whole mountain covered in snow” deals, not what I’ve since experienced in the US of the slopes being a big patch of snow on the side of a green mountain. 

            Snow-plowing is the basic, beginner mode of skiing, wherein you point your skis in a triangle, tips facing in on each other.  It’s very slow but secure.  It doesn’t work very well on steep hills.  Eventually you transition to parallel, in which you keep the skis apart, parallel to each other.  This is much faster and gets you down the hill much quicker, but you have to know what you’re doing.  By now I’ve mastered snow plowing to the point of being able to ski on intermediate slopes, and I’m making the transition to parallel.

 Trip 3.  Sometime in college (1988?) to Ski Roundtop in Pennsylvania.  My brother couldn’t drive yet, so he asked me if I could drive him and his buddies (roommate Dave and a few others) up to this slope in southern PA.  Matt had bought his own skis by this time, but we had no ski rack on the Cavalier, so he has the skis down the middle of the car.  They were all expert skiers, so I was left snowplowing the lesser slopes by myself.

 Trip 4.  Garmisch (1990) with Phil (far left in middle picture – I’m next to him in the blue jacket) and Matt.  Garmisch-Partenkirchen is a small town in Germany on the Austrian border, just south of Munich.  The main mountain there, the Zugspitze, is the tallest mountain in the German Alps – the full map is upper left, but difficult to see when reduced so small (sorry).  The 1936 Winter Olympics were held there.  By this time it was home to the US Armed Forces Recreation Center (AFRC) which gave us access to some fairly utilitarian military hotels – we stayed in the Patton Hotel – and a Breitenau “entertainment complex” which for us just meant a place we could get American pizza.  We’d drink 75 cent beers and $1.50 tequila sunrises at the hotel bar, but since the bar closed at midnight, that didn’t give us enough time to get hammered.  The playoffs were going on by this time, but our teams, the Vikings (me), Steelers (Matt) and Giants (Phil) all got knocked out.  I also remember listening to the first Raging Slab album nonstop, particularly “Geronimo”.  That album always takes me back to Garmisch.

            We’d get the first train up the mountain in the morning and take the last one down in the evening.  The train took about an hour to get up or down, packed with us and 90% Germans.  Matt and Phil were expert skiers, so I’d be skiing by myself yet again; we’d meet up at the main chalet for lunch and rendezvous there around 5 p.m. at the end of the skiing day.  On one particular day we didn’t ski – we took a half day bus trip into Munich, the highlight of which was the Olympic Stadium, which I only later found out was the home stadium of Bayern Munchen. 

            Matt had his own skis.  I had turned in my rentals the day before.  Phil held on to his rentals until the day we were due to leave, resulting in a mad dash to return them, buy the return train tickets, and get the train back from Munich to Paris.  Hold the train, bitte!  Phil was flying to Paris, so he just had to get from the train station to the airport.

 5.  Ski Liberty (December 2009).  By this time, almost 20 years later, I had done no skiing in between, but I picked up where I left off.  The girl I was dating – she refused to deign to call me her boyfriend – wanted to try skiing, so I agreed to drive her and her friends there.  She had never skied, so this time I was the one zipping down the mountain while she took lessons.

 6.  Massanutten (December 2009).  The same girl had friends who had a timeshare at this resort in western Virginia along I-81.  We got there on a Friday night, which we spent at the indoor pool, and reserved all Saturday to skiing, returning on Sunday.  She took lessons again and spent her time on a “bunny slope” which was so mild it looked like a flat surface; what passed for a lift was a conveyer belt.   For my part, I finally started making the transition to parallel skiing.  I still haven’t had any lessons on how to do so, so my technique therein is kind of weak.

 7.  Mt. Peter (March 2011).  The Current GF does deign to call me her boyfriend.  I took her teenage son and his friends to this resort in southeast New York (an hour northwest of Fort Lee, New Jersey) for a full day of skiing.  They were all snowboarding, so yet again I was skiing by myself.  I fell a few times and skied a little worse than at Massanutten, which tells me I need formal lessons on parallel skiing to perfect an imperfect, self-taught technique.

 Falls.  I have fallen a few times, but haven’t wiped out since Saas Fee – we’re talking coming down the mountain at full speed, out of control until you wind up on your back, skis in different directions, hopefully not with anything twisted or broken.  I fell forward once at Mt. Peter on the expert slope, and it took me awhile to get back up, but fortunately I avoided twisting my ankle or having a ski come off and slide its way down the mountain – how am I supposed to get down on one ski?  Most falls are back down onto the mountain, which are not really a big deal.

 Injuries.  I’m glad to say that in 7 times skiing I have never been injured.  I’ve gotten a few bruises, and had some sores where my pants rubbed against my leg under the ski boots, but the injury I’m most concerned about – breaking a leg or grotesquely twisting an ankle 180 degrees – has never occurred.  And I do sometimes tackle intermediate and expert slopes to challenge myself.

 Lifts.  What I’ve seen in the US is consistently chair lifts.  Back in Europe they had these T-bar things, basically boat anchors.  You could only barely lean on them – if you tried to sit down they would not support your weight and you’d fall down in the track.  Since your skis never leave the ground, they seem much safer than chair lifts, which pull you up in the air, but it’s very easy to fall off, and if you do, you’re right in front of the next person coming up the hill.  Moreover, the T-bar is very unstable with only one person on it, so you really have to pair up on it.  A chair lift doesn’t care if it’s one or two people, which really helps as 95% of the time I’m skiing by myself on the mountain itself, regardless of how many people I came with. 

 Rentals.  My brother bought some high quality Rossignol skis, which he then had to carry back and forth, while the rest of us got by with returning rentals and bringing only the clothes on our backs.  I’ve never been skiing consistently enough to make a purchase worth the bother of carrying the damn things around instead of going with rentals. 

 Snowboarding.  This is a fairly recent development.  I don’t think I saw any snowboarders back at Garmisch in 1990.  I have to say I have zero interest in it.  It looks to me like an attempt to transplant surfing to the slopes and live in a Mountain Dew commercial.  All the snowboarders I saw were falling down on their asses fairly often.

 Freaks.  Aside from snowboarders, who are too prevalent to be called freaks, there were variants on the skiing experience I found odd.   

1.  No ski poles.  WTF?  Why ski without poles?  Too cheap to rent them?

2.  Very short skis.  Likewise, what’s the deal with these?

3. Cross-country.  I haven’t seen this in awhile.  Cross-country skiers look like those goofy old people “power walking”. 

4.  Ski overalls and t-shirt.  When the weather permits, the snowboarder Mountain Dew dudes strip down to this get-up, a super casual deal.  Then again, I just wear jeans, but I’ll certainly wear a jacket, even if it isn’t cold enough to merit thermal underwear – which I haven’t worn since Saas Fee.

5.  String.  I saw a few people skiing not only without poles, they were holding string in front of them in a “cat’s cradle” kind of deal.  Ski freaks!

6. Helmets.  What’s with that?  Half the people on the slope were wearing helmets.  Not military helmets, but special ski helmets with the goggles.  I’ve fallen down lots of times, but never fell on my head, which seems like the least likely part of your body to be injured skiing.   Even goggles are questionable: I needed goggles at Ski Liberty due to the incessant snow-makers throwing snow on the slopes, but didn’t have them.  Then I got goggles, and haven’t needed them since.  They wind up in my locker.