Month: January 2017

The weather outside isn’t frightful, it’s wonderful. We’ve been eyeballing the weather reports for weeks, crossing our fingers and praying, and the snow has finally arrived!

I have survived. Last year I was nervous about starting ski school (with the gondola and the chairlift and all the unknowns), but it was a good time and I learned a lot. Kind of like kindergarten. This year all the kindergarten fun was left behind and I had to learn to carve, turn, and ski faster. Still fun, but stressful, exhausting fun.

I was debating going with the advanced beginner group (since I don’t like to push myself), but Josh said that I would be bored and should go with the intermediates since my current skills matched up with that class description. It worked out fine, and I had a great instructor and classmates, but it really stretched me more than I would have chosen. From what I could gather, most of the adults in my group had skied extensively in the past (lessons, college ski club, colorado living), and were in the class to get a refresher course, whereas little old me has had a total of 8 days on skis in my entire life and am learning all of these skills for the first time. But I fit in fine and though I skied a little slower than everyone else, I also fell less! Credit goes to working out (almost) every day — I may not have been as technically proficient, but I never had any doubts about being able to keep up physically.

Our ski week started out a bit rough. The snow conditions were terrible and holiday crowds on the slopes felt like driving the 405 on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. I wasn’t sure I was going to survive 5 days of dodging ice patches and people. The weather was warm and the snow was icy since a freak rainstorm had washed out all the decent snow the day before we arrived. The first 2 days it was too warm to make more snow (the temperature has to fall below freezing to turn on the snow cannons), so we were all slipping and sliding around. The snowboarders got the worst of it as they couldn’t catch an edge on the slick slopes and were falling down hard.

Thankfully a cold front moved in on the second afternoon so the snow machines could start blowing 24 hours a day which quickly improved things. By the end of the week I enjoying it much more, though by then, my body was so tired from 5 straight days of work that I felt like my skiing was getting worse instead of better. The kids all say that ski/snowboard school was the highlight of their vacation. And yes, they are already asking to come again next year. We’ve taken a few days off to rest our bodies and with serious snow in the forecast, we’ve promised them another 2 days on the slopes. Camille will go back to Ski Kids school, since they have instructors that will help her and teach her all day, but the 5 of us will try and tackle some mountains together. I think we’re all approximately at the same level of difficulty so it will be fun to go ride some chair lifts together and see how everyone has improved over the past week. Last year because we were all beginners we passed each other on the same hills every day, but this year our groups were spread out all over the mountain.