It’s a strange thing skiing; today, in the brilliant sunshine, I felt as if I couldn’t do a thing wrong. I was concentrating on tipping my skis over as far as I dared as I made turns. The new shaped skis (or carvers as they are known) allow you to turn the skis by using their broad tips and narrow waist and pressure from the feet. The faster you go, the more you need to tilt your skis on their edges. When you get it right, you experience a fantastic feeling of accelerating out of each turn and this is known as carving. Inexperienced skiers tend not to edge their skis much, and slide around turns as their skis lose grip. People who are proficient at carving leave perfectly parallel crisp tracks on the snow and seem to expend the minimum of effort in a beautiful rhythmic dance down the slope.
The freezing fog from yesterday left the trees coated in a beautiful white frost, which melted slowly through the day. The birds seem quite active today. I have seen Clark’s Nutcracker just about every day, and heard Mountain Chickadee too. Today, they seemed to be everywhere. Its noticeable here that the Clark’s Nutcrackers and chickadees don’t seem to hang around the eateries on the mountain, compared to the ski areas around Banff in Canada, where they take food off peoples’ plates. Here they seem to feed naturally. Apart from a pair of Ravens, we’ve seen nothing else. So much for my hope of running into a Williamson’s Sapsucker, which ought to be present. Perhaps they descend to lower altitudes in winter?
We skied all over the mountain, including down to California Lodge which involved negotiating some areas where the snow was running bare. A lot of people were coming down a trail called the Gunbarrel, which is a long, steep and bumpy “double black” run that’s way beyond my capabilities. Some were wearing t-shirts only on top, a sign of how mild it gets at midday.
Back in the hotel room, I flicked through endless crap TV channels. One show, hosted by local ski personality Glen Plake (distinctive for his foot-high multi-coloured mohican hairstyle), was definitely made on a tight budget. The show featured all kinds of drossy ski and snowboard video clips. Though interestingly, he showed some footage from last winter's “Gunbarrel Challenge”, in which hundreds of contestants try to negotiate the Gunbarrel Trail above California Lodge 25 times in the shortest possible time. They must have thighs of steel. The close of his show was a group of punters in a bar somewhere in SoLaTa (work it out) whooping at video clips of people having terrible ski/snowboard accidents. The more horrendous the accident, the louder they whooped and that decided the eventual winning “accident”.
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