The latest snow, weather, resort news, tip bits, random thoughts, photos and videos from across North America.
A casual conversation can later have a lot of unanticipated consequences.
Last week I left you in the middle of my short career as a ski tour director all over Europe.
A couple of the windows in our mountain house are rattling against the onslaught of what turned out to be gusts up to 78MPH winds today.
It’s Presidents’ Week, so let me recall a time we all remember so well.
The sky above the village was slowly changing from grey to the pale blue of dawn.
Amazing the things that are tucked into my feeble brain…as I work on the autobiography, more and more of them surface.
There were guests from almost everywhere the other night in our house for dinner.
I have been very lucky for years because years ago I decided to hang my skis on a mountain in Montana and move from the middle of the Colorado Rockies.
Last night I held the future in my arms when our two young friends Nic and Jenny stopped by with their new baby, who they have named Magnolia Leigh.
At lunch last winter in the Timberline Café, a friend and his son who had graduated from college the previous spring joined me.
I just hung up the phone after an hour of talking with Ward Baker who is the only person I know who is as dumb as I am. We slept in the parking lots of almost every ski resort in the West that had a chairlift, in a small trailer with no heat.
It was roughly 1955. I was short of cash from Jan. 1 until Dec. 31 that same year as in the past and future. I was staying on a friend’s living room couch as often as possible and I figured that two nights sleeping on an uncomfortable sofa would save me $10 that I would have had to spend for two nights in a motel, but could buy raw film instead.
In Aspen I ran into Don Bren who was trying to get a berth on the 1956 Olympic ski team. He and his wife had rented a small log home somewhere in town and I really liked his couch. While he skied and trained hard every day, his wife worked for Howard Aurey at the Skiers Chalet, a restaurant alongside the old Number One chairlift. (The piece of land came up for sale in the early 1950s for $9,000 and Howard went right to the bank, drew out the money, and bought it. When the survey was done he also owned the land the chairlift was on all the way up to tower two or three. But that’s part of another story.)
As it always has been since I was a little kid in the early 1930s, sometime in November the wind will come honking out of the north, the rain will fall, and the snow will come to the mountains.
Isn’t that enough?
Sometime 50 years ago, give or take ten years, I first showed up at Mount Snow, Vermont. I was attracted by a man named Walt Schoenknecht and his innovative ideas. I thought some of Walt’s ideas were on the verge of genius, but, you can be the judge.
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