Skiing With Sven

Originally printed in the Mountain Ear 12/16/2010)

I have a pet peeve and it revolves around the term “ice” as it relates to skiing. Being a 30+ year vet of East Coast skiing and having grown up when snowmaking was still a relatively new technology, I have a certain view of “ice” as it relates to skiing. I should mention this came from a conversation I had the other day, when someone in our group complained about the “sheet of ice” that they had just skied across. I looked back as I had followed this individual down the trail and had found nothing even remotely close to ice out on the trail. In fact I would have had a hard time saying the section of trail they had just skied was “boilerplate”, I might have given him hard pack but that is about as far as I was willing to go.

Some may think this has to do with my time spent as a PR director at a local resort, but it actually goes back much further than that. I remember getting into arguments with a friend during college who was from Vail and used to complain about ‘icy” conditions the day after a foot of powder and I would just about loose my mind.

I was trying to figure out why this is such a big deal to me. I no longer have to worry about doing snow reports, so that isn’t the issue, so what is it? I thought about it and came up with this. As a kid my Dad would have me follow him down the hill and he’d look for ice, shiny, blue, rock hard, uneven ice, and he’d make a turn on it and I’d try to hold his line and more often than not I’d fall down. However over the years I got better, and eventually I was able to actually make that turn and hold it on that ice. It was like a badge of honor and it was a skill that I had worked hard to develop.

To be honest it’s been a long time since I’ve seen much real “ice” on the hill, but I do still look for it after those awful rain “events” we sometimes see midwinter that are followed by bitter cold. I look for that blue ice and I try to make my turn. I can tell I’m spoiled by good conditions as now I often have a hard time with holding my turn, but I still take pride in trying and using it as a way to find out if I’m standing on my skis in the right spot.

So I think I’ve figured it out, when someone calls hard pack conditions “ice” I feel the old curmudgeon in me want to leap out and say, “you ain’t seen no ice sonny, why back when I was knee high to a ski patroller....”. Regardless, the good news- we very rarely see ice out on the trails anymore, and for that I certainly won’t complain.