I first skied here in the late 1960s. Further to the left there used to be a rope tow. God those are awful. What a fucked up way to teach a whiny long-haired city kid how to ski: Strap sticks on his feet and make him grab a rope as if he were some kind of inverted cable car. I still remember being dragged screaming up the hill, too scared to let go.
Anyway, nowadays I start with the bunny slope here, just to get my snow legs.
One pass is all it takes for me to get bored with that and go get on a real ski lift. What passes for one at Boreal, anyway.
Up, up, up. This is what you see.
From the top of the ridge, over the top of the mountain, you can see another ski resort. This is Mt. Disney at Sugar Bowl. I love Sugar Bowl. I don't ski enough to get there much.
Sugar Bowl is where my folks learned to ski, I think, round about 1950 or so.
Back behind it you can see yet another ski resort. I don't know offhand. Maybe it's more Sugar Bowl.
The top of the Accelerator as daylight fades into the mists that rise off the mountain.
This was a "quarterly," i.e. one of those work things where they remind us why we work there instead of for one competitor or other. Actually, for our intense kind of work, shit like this is really helpful. For one thing, you meet cow-orkers you otherwise wouldn't. And if the division is feeling generous, get drunk with them. I had a nice buzz on by the time night fell and we were going out again.
Which helps when you can't see the contours of the snow you're skiing on, because you are relaxed, and it just doesn't matter. Drunks do better in car crashes too. Of course, they're in a lot more of them.
I wanted to drive this thing.
I wanted to drive this thing too. Alas.
3 comments:
Rope tows! Oh god. And in the spring especially, the rope would get wet which meant that, to get a grip, my gloves would get soaked. Sometimes there'd even be water streaming up my sleeve, icy cold water. Rope tows are barbaric.
Nice photos. Great color on the night shots.
That picture of the sole tree busted off made me pull pretty much everything south of my belt up above the chair.
We still have a rope tow at H'ardack, the local hill where I taught my kids how to demolish the snow fencing with their bodies^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ski.
Oh, it's fun up on that ridge when an icy wind comes up and stirs up the snow and everything goes white and suddenly you don't know which side of the mountain is back to the resort and which is down into five miles of freezing wilderness.
Post a Comment