by Scott Teresi
January 2002
www.teresi.us/skiing

	Off-trail skiing on a foot of powder at Breckenridge, Colorado.

This is the first contact I’ve had with the big world wide widget in a week. Has it changed much? Can I use Google to find where my automatic camera is on the ski slope? I forgot to velcro shut my coat pocket. The camera fell out as I catapulted myself upside down in a last-ditch effort to regain control during a botched left turn at the steep upper part of a bowl-shaped hill covered with 3’ piles of snow. I realized the camera was gone when I attempted to photograph the mountainside I’d just descended. I’ve got a ton of things to tell you about the trip, but at the rate this painstaking adjective-filled transcription is being produced (sorry for the passive voice), I won’t finish by the time my plane leaves.

I skied for 5-6 hours each day for six days straight, Sunday to Friday. My entire body hurt each morning when I got up at 7. It wasn’t very cold at all, except the last day had gale-force winds at the top of the highest lift. The views were spectacular when the sun came out. The horizon was a string of mountains which define the continental divide. The mountains we skied on were massive and steep, but you can’t judge distance very well on a snow-covered incline, and the snow’s usually deep and not icy, so I never felt like I’d fall off the mountain, though I think it was sometimes a possibility.

The snow was icy Wednesday but later that night 11.5 inches fell on Breckenridge, where our condo was and where we skied most days. So Thursday morning I skied over rolling hills and dales of fluffy powder, something I’d never experienced before. If you keep your speed up and your skis close together, you actually will float somewhere within those 11 inches, and you can turn at your ankles with little resistance. At that point, skiing supposedly becomes almost effortless, or so I’m told. Unfortunately, the only place to find such pristine skiing surfaces are right near the out-of-bounds ropes where few skiers venture because they’re time-consuming to get to (long lift lines and exhausting traversals) or actually require you to hike across and up the mountain a ways.

A frigid snow-covered mountain looms over Winter Park ski resort, Colorado.