SkiFreaks – Splitting Tips

Act I Scene 1,

(A beautiful classic nordic ski day at the Morgan Arboretum – Entering, stage right: Alex Mike, Robbie, Ysabel, and Dave; stage left: Steph and Olaf)

- Hail and well met, Friends! Behold the snow is wondrous fair and proper to our endeavour. What say you?

Okay, I’m way too behind in my blogging to indulge myself writing this as a play.
You can heave that sigh of relief now.

The lot of us took the blue trail from the very full parking lot and disappeared in the woods. Much to our surprise we saw only one other skier other than ourselves on the trail. Lucky number seven scores again! What can I say? It’s gotta be luck. We made it about half way around including a trip to Break-a-Leg Skier Gulch, which Mike, Alex, Dave, Olaf, and I braved and conquered, without mishap. Then disaster struck: by some mischance (I was not a witness to the occurrence, being too far in the rear) my sister Alex somehow tangled with a vicious gang of twigs or perhaps a small tree and broke a ski tip. Well, not so much broke as split. So there she was with a floppy tip and half the trail still left to ski.

Lucky number seven rules: because she was skiing with a biologist, two engineers, a potter, and two machinists we were able to effect a hair elastic and twig repair that allowed her to complete the second half of the loop (Tee hee, I love baling wire and twine repair solutions – that should worry the people who know what I do for a living, but only a very tiny little bit…). After a slight entanglement with some lady and her ill-mannered pooch about the proper and stress free way to feed the chickadees, the skiing was over.

Sigh.The fun stuff is always over too soon.

SkiFreaks – Sermon on the Mount

Ullr, Norse Ski God

Okay. Just because we went skiing on a Sunday does not entitle me to make sacrilegious biblical references. In my defense, I couldn't resist: it looks way too cool in writing. I promise it will be the last in a string of bad jokes, flip comments, and even worse puns. Well, almost the last, I’m still not perfect.

Sunday morning saw the SkiFreaks, collected from far and wide, off to Mount Sutton. From Cote-Saint-Luc, Westmount, St-Henri, Brossard, Sutton, and Pierrefonds they gathered. There are, unfortunately, no pictures. The glades were still there, and despite a wrong turn or two, the runs were pretty good to excellent. Some of the greens were a little grassy (maybe that’s why they’re rated “green”?), and surprisingly bumpy and icy. Mostly the trails were nicely white and groomed. Surprisingly easy once I’d gotten accustomed to my skis being sharp and I’d relaxed a bit, which pretty much had to wait until all the lost had been found since we decided to separate and meet up again later. Kay, Jodie, and Christine started up ahead, and Mersudin, Damir, Jode, and I didn’t find them until about two thirty. After some confusion about instructions shouted from the trail to the chair (Mersudin and I were right, dammit!), a detour on the other chairs, a pee, a clamato, and a little toe thawing later we were finally zipping down the run under the quad as an ensemble cast. In the lead, I stopped on a hummock at the side of the trail to admire the view, only to find Mersudin barreling down on me, his expression formed with malicious intent. He was going to hit me with the mother of all snow showers. It was instantly apparent that there was no way he could stop before taking me out like a ninepin. I watched with unease as his expression changed from glee to consternation in a matter of nanoseconds as he suddenly came to the same conclusion. He leapt into his own cloud of snow and ended up turtled and frosted on the trail in front of me. It, of course, never even occurred to me that maybe I should move. I’m still chuckling about it. Jodie and Kay arrived laughing so hard that Jodie just fell over, which got us all laughing. Christine hit me with her snow shower, sorry Chris, not quite as spectacular as Mersudin’s. “What’s going on here?” asked Jode, bringing up the rear. Mersudin will have to put up with his son Damir’s ribbing for some time to come. We made last lift and rode up as the garbage came down for the last run as the sun peeked back at us through the clouds like golden light from Heaven. It was, after all’s said and done, a form of worship. At least I think so. You need not.

Thou shalt not spray your friends with snow.
Thou shalt not shove.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s ski poles.(Absolutely last biblical reference)

Global Warming???

Polar Bears in the Arctic...
Snow in London....

SkiFreaks – Too Whit Too Whoo?

Owl's Head! I write truth! The SkiFreaks were there! Roger picked both Maya and myself up in his very sexy cherry red metal fleck rental PT Cruiser and we were off in style, and on time! One hour and twenty odd minutes of Lebanese driving later we had arrived. Yes, alive and of sound mind. Cool, bonus!

Once we were all equipped with our favoured snow sport equipment (skis for Roger and myself, a snowboard for Maya) we made our way to the bunny slopes for some warm up (and oodles of pictures). One run was enough to be boring so we switched to the detachable quad and made our way up to the tippy top. The view was spectacular!

I must admit to some trepidation upon viewing the Kamikaze trail from the lift. That run was knee-poppingly icy and steep with huge piles of scraped up damp, heavy, powder for extra delight. We decided to start with a blue run. Ignorance being bliss, the state of the run we saw from the chair turned out to be a good predictor of the conditions of the other steep trails. Not great with my dull, several years out of date technology skis, never mind the severe attack of the holy crap, shit, OMG! heebie jeebies, especially since I tend to cringe away from the slope when experiencing non-confidence of survival. This, of course, puts my weight on the tails, making the skis harder to turn and less likely to bite into the ice. Plus the lunges I had done the night before (…ahem…) left my already weak as pudding legs pretty wobbly. So: from my perspective, it was not a good second outing of the season. Specially since Owl’s head is possessed of terrifying steep iciness or dum-diddlely-dum-dum-dull mostly flat runs where you really get to work your cardio – particularly on a snowboard – right Maya?

The company however was awesome: Maya the Fearless Flying Falafel amazed with her boarding prowess and her friend Roger, the Kamikaze Kibbé, King of the double black diamonds (the, there is no-way in hell you're getting me to go down a double black diamond under the chair that's a sheet of ice sprinkled with snow piles the size of giant boulders but you go ahead and kill yourself if that's what amuses you, coincidentally called the Kamikaze ski run, ski run).

My monikers were a hit and provided oodles of amusement in the chair. Roger deftly combined skiing with photography – thanks for all these great pictures – and Maya and I had fun watching the para-skiers being put on the chair. Those para-skiers were amazing! The lift guys that kept dropping them however, um, not so much – although I have to admit, it looked like a pretty tricky operation. So, since I and my knees survived Owl’s head, stay tuned for next week’s installment: Mont Sutton!

Flying Felafel, Crazy Canuck, and Kamikaze Kibbé

Yippee! I survived to ski another day!