Fundamentalism
According to PSIA.
According to PSIA, the Five Fundamentals of alpine skiing are:
1. Fore–Aft Pressure
Mass moves over base
Directs pressure fore and aft
Along the ski length
2. Ski-to-ski / Outside Ski
Pressure foot to foot
Directed to outside ski
Arcing tip to tail
3. Edging
Edge angles controlled
Incline and angulate more
Tip from lower leg
4. Rotation
Skis rotate with legs
Separate from upper body
Steering with the feet
5. Pressure Magnitude
Regulate pressure
Ski to snow interaction
Flexion, extension
On Finitiation
Ski school is ending.
―
By April, the sun has developed an agenda. Breckenridge’s lifts keep turning, but it’s mostly for show; chairs pass overhead like empty gondolas in a diorama. A film of windblown dust settles over the remaining snowpack, dulling its reflectivity and speeding its retreat. Down in the North Gondola lot, meltwater feels out the terrain with the patience of a surveyor, committing to the lowest routes with increasing confidence. Birdsong resumes its looped soundtrack. The mountain, deprived of school holidays and long weekends, begins its yearly slide toward irrelevance.
Ski school ends the way snow does—grain by grain. The J1s disappear first. Part-timers fold themselves back into their other lives. The rituals loosen: less chatter in the locker room, fewer dad jokes at line-up, a general sense of people backing away from the season without fully turning their backs on it. Someone’s Bluetooth speaker plays rock music at a volume that implies finale. Outside, bulldozers idle next to rows of early-season mountain bikes. Our locker room building will be razed as soon as we vacate. No one is sentimental enough to stop it; no one is immune enough not to notice.
Guests often ask, “What do instructors do in the off-season?” Most of us offer the old punch line about taking the moguls inside for the summer.
The first week of May feels illicit. No uniform, no hot chocolate vouchers, no obligation to pretend enthusiasm for a blue run in flat light. There’s a short-lived pleasure in domestic tasks: laundry, neglected mail, the rediscovery of sandals. Then the silence stops being restorative and becomes simply silence. By June, many instructors have drifted into a low-wattage depression—nothing acute, just a sense that the structure that held the winter in place is no longer load-bearing.
This drift can look like anything: minimum-wage summer jobs, halfhearted travel, or an earnest attempt to “catch up on life,” which typically collapses into scrolling through photos of powder days we already lived. Writing assignments returned to my inbox, and I met them with escalating reluctance. My dog became the only creature with a clear agenda. The off-season had a way of exposing all the seams winter had hidden.
The cognitive dissonance was consistent: without skiing, I felt reduced to the version of myself I’d paused in October, someone who didn’t feel entirely accurate anymore. Two identities rubbing together with just enough friction to blister.
I eventually understood that it wasn’t skiing I missed so much as teaching—its focus, its tempo, the way it stabilizes a day. So I followed that feeling toward water.
Whitewater, at first. Students practicing wet exits in a reservoir the color of tea; then peel-outs, ferries, a few tame rapids. On the Colorado, with a line of novice paddlers bobbing behind me, some internal gear re-engaged. Whatever part of me had belonged to winter recognized the structure: a moving medium, a technical vocabulary, the need to make good decisions in flux. The boundary between seasons, previously so rigid, began to dissolve.
It turned out the off-season wasn’t “off” at all. It was a misnomer—what felt like absence was simply an unclaimed form of the same work.
Ski instructors love to talk about transition—the hardest part of a turn. It’s often called “finitiation,” the moment between the old turn and the new, where direction and pressure reassign themselves and the skier pretends the change is smooth. Most of the time, it isn’t. The body knows it’s a hinge point, a brief negotiation before committing.
The end of the ski season functions the same way. April memorizes meltwater the way December studies snowpack. Nights refreeze; days undo it. Creeks rise and recede in a single afternoon. Water returns to its previous channels, records its edits: a shifted stone, a revised edge, a small rebellion in direction.
Nothing is lost, exactly. It just becomes something else.
This summer, I’ll trade the river’s turbulence for the abstraction of the Maine coast. Longer boat, broader water, fewer immediate hazards but more consequences when they happen. I’ll steer clients around lobster buoys, toast bagels over driftwood, check the winds with the same reverence ski instructors reserve for snow forecasts. The job description doesn’t really change: read the conditions, place the craft where it needs to be, anticipate the forces that want to move you.
Snow is water; water is weather; weather is work.
So, what do ski instructors do in the off-season? We finitiate, in the truest sense of the word. Sometimes awkwardly. Sometimes with fluency. Often with a brief, dull ache of disorientation and a touch of weight gain.
Spring Break
Poems about most of March.
―
Most of March:
Never-Evers
Magic carpet hums—
never-evers in neon
skitter like pennies.
Texas
Texas Week arrives:
time to ski fast, have some fun—
howdy, altitude.
College Kids
Skiing bikinis—
twenties spill toward the future
like snowmelt downhill.
4:00 To Town
Après hum rises—
music drifting up the slopes
like heat off spring snow.
Ski The Void
I conflate Hegel and skiing.
―
For most skiers, visibility mediates reality. It draws the line between a transcendent powder day and a whiteout in which sky and snow fuse into a single, horizonless field. Above treeline at Breckenridge, this happens often: forty-mile-per-hour winds lift ice crystals into the air, flattening light until even the chairlifts vanish. Perspective buckles. You feel motion while standing still, or stillness while moving. Skiing becomes a form of touch—performed with the feet, interpreted by nerve.
A teenager from Brooklyn had come for the above-treeline expanse, but visibility kept insisting otherwise. After a morning of hiding in the trees, he and I decided to try Imperial Bowl. Whale’s Tail was closed by a patrol rope, so we aimed for George’s Thumb, a face known for its rocks and its indifference to confidence.It was named for the man who first scouted it, George, who attempted to document his discovery and instead photographed his own gloved thumb.
We slid past the gate and stepped into nothing. No slope. No sky. Just a depthless gray. For a moment, I wondered if I’d misjudged the situation: a city kid, a burning-out guide, a vanishing world. But he stood patiently behind me, waiting for my instructions.
“One turn at a time,” I shouted. “Follow me closely.”
I nudged one ski downward, then the other. A single turn became a second, then a third—slow, tentative movements through the blank. Then a rock appeared: not a threat but a reference point. Another followed. We used what we’d usually avoid. Eventually the fence above North Bowl emerged, and the visible world returned.
Behind us, the featureless expanse resumed its silence. The kid yipped with victory.
Whiteouts are rarely described accurately. They’re not metaphors; they’re conditions. Yet skiing them strips away distraction in a way that makes metaphor tempting.
A few days earlier, on the T-Bar, a longtime client and I had talked about religion—not belief so much as the frameworks people use when certainty is scarce. Hegel’s phrase from the Phenomenology, “spirit is a bone,” rose up from memory: Geist locating itself in the physical. In the void of George’s Thumb, the idea shed its academic tone. Spirit wasn’t lofty. It had weight, bindings, and edges. It was a body figuring out where the next turn might land.
Philosophy has many voids. Buddhism’s shunyata—emptiness without nihilism. Existentialism’s lack of inherent meaning. Physics’ vacuum. Literature’s dread and absurdity. But skiing the void is different. It is not conceptual. It is immediate. Everything extraneous falls away. There is only the angle of your skis, the texture underfoot, the willingness to commit to a space you cannot see.
Nietzsche’s well-worn line about the abyss holds that it gazes back. Had he dropped into a whiteout, he might have added that the abyss also clarifies. Not grandly, but practically. It tells you what is actually under you. It strips your attention to its essentials. It edits the adjectives of the world until only verbs in the present tense survive.
We reached the bottom without incident. The boy found his mother; I found the locker room. But the void lingered after visibility returned. The sensation of moving through something that erased you even as you moved within it leaves a faint residue—an awareness that reality is more permeable than it seems.
It doesn’t take renunciation or retreat to recognize this. The mountains provide their own thresholds—spaces where perspective collapses and must be rebuilt turn by turn. You exit the void, but the recalibration lasts longer than the descent.
The void is always there, even when unseen, waiting for the next blizzard. And so, improbably, are we.
Self-Arrest
On stopping after falling down.
―
At the lip of Horseshoe Bowl, my eight-year-old student stops moving. She’s a sparrow-sized figure against a corniced ridge at eleven thousand feet, where wind carves the snow into permanent waves and ptarmigan tracks vanish overnight. Below us, a north-facing pitch drops sharply—her first double black.
She’s skied with quiet confidence all week, but this slope shifts the terms of the conversation. She leans forward, a small question mark, and gravity answers before I do.
She starts well enough, then her hips drift behind her heels. A ski clips a wind-formed mogul. One binding releases, then the other. She tumbles—pink helmet blinking in the white—until a mound of sun-softened snow interrupts the slide. The mountain stops her eventually, as mountains do. The question is always how, and whether we get a say in it.
By the time I reach her, she’s upright, breathing in short, surprised bursts. Her goggles are crooked; her tears are not.
Another spring, in the Lake Chutes, I watched two twelve-year-olds slip nearly four hundred feet down a forty-degree pitch. The weather had turned abruptly—clouds dropping low, erasing the terrain, converting the familiar into a blank page. Fear spread faster than instruction. One boy slid first. The other stepped forward to help, and the lip gave way beneath both.
What saved them wasn’t luck. It was technique—imperfect, improvised, enough. Elbows, knees, shoulders: small points of friction interrupting gravity’s plan. They had practiced self-arrest before. Not gracefully, but deliberately. By the time the slope relented, they were upright and waving.
The difference between those falls—my young skier caught by the mountain, the boys catching themselves—is the difference between luck and agency. Skiers talk a great deal about control, though the artistry of skiing lies in letting go.
Self-arrest is not glamorous. It’s procedural. You accept that you can’t prevent every slide, so you learn how to inhabit the slide: soften, angle, dig, interrupt. You won’t stop it entirely; that isn’t the job. The job is to reshape its trajectory before the trees appear.
Versions of this exist off snow. A job collapses. A relationship implodes. A diagnosis redraws the perimeter of a life. People imagine resilience as refusal. More often, it’s timing—knowing when to meet momentum, when to oppose it, and how to slow it by degrees.
My student gathers her equipment, breath steadier now, and clicks in again. I tell her what many instructors never say aloud: fall better. I don’t tell her how to prevent another slide, but to meet it with intention.
She drops in. She falls again. This time she digs in—an elbow, a knee—and stops herself halfway down. A small, deliberate interruption. No tears.
At the bottom, we look back at Horseshoe Bowl curving upward like a parenthesis—holding what just happened without defining it. The terrain hasn’t changed. She has.
“Fall better” sounds like ski jargon, but it’s something else entirely. It’s what remains after strength and nerve ebb with age, after the confidence of good conditions becomes a rarity. It’s the ability to place a small wedge of agency between yourself and whatever is accelerating beneath you. Not mastery—just influence.
Self-arrest, in practice, is almost never dramatic. It’s incremental: a shift of weight, a differently placed arm, the refusal to go rigid at the wrong moment. Children learn it on snow; adults relearn it everywhere else. A promotion evaporates. A relationship implodes. Real estate gives way. The instinct is to brace or deny the fall. But the quieter, steadier instinct—the one that comes with practice—is to make enough contact with gravity to soften the outcome by degrees.
From the chairlift, the bowl already looks less severe. Her fall has contracted into the mountain’s larger grammar, one clause among thousands. By tomorrow, it will be a chapter; in a week, a footnote. But her body will archive the lesson: a template for how to meet a sudden drop with attention rather than abandon.
Powder Power
I wish it would snow.
―
Colorado winters once began in September. Early season storms blew in regular as a mother’s exasperation: flurries at first, then fury overnight. Bluebird morning afters-glittered with fresh powder.
In my foothills neighborhood, the season’s first snowstorm conclaved its own small ceremony: kids slipping out in sneakers with bald treads to slide around the unplowed asphalt; adults excavating shovels or cursing snowblowers that hadn’t been touched since April. Snowmaking guns, even at the fanciest resorts, sat idle—embarrassing, almost, in the face of winter’s self-sufficiency.
Back then, the peaks kept their whites year-round, veils dropping all the way to the valley floor. We believed winter could take care of herself. And she did. Now she arrives like a transfer student long after the semester has begun—November, if we’re lucky.
Snow holds memory the way the subconscious does: in layers. If you know how to read it, the record is plain.
Early season now stretches across too many cloudless forty-degree days. Whispers circulate—worst December in twenty years—as lessons are canceled, and resorts post strategic crops on social media to catfish the thin cover. In-bounds snowpack grows from the bottom up: fragile facets forming a man-made hoar layer, a kind of rot beneath a cosmetic surface. The “white ribbon of death,” once a joke about the East Coast, is no longer a punchline. Even the ribbon frays.
C., one of my favorite students, arrived as she always does—on time, in her red jacket that flashes against the high-alpine white like a cardinal. This year, the “white” was more aspiration than fact. Roped-off fields of rock barred her favorite lines. She made the best of it until the disappointment began to show. Surveying the sad bumps under E Chair, she sighed as if looking at something spoiled.
“Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…” she sang, mostly to herself, mostly out of boredom.
But the atmosphere seemed to hear her. A quick shake of flurries answered. On the next lap she tried again; the sky obliged with another faint shimmer. By the following day, the pattern repeated. We decided, unscientifically but happily, that she was communing with the weather. A mythology emerged: part Norse, part Disney. Ullr missing. Elsa calling him back. Their reunion would bring the storm.
We never named the villain.
February has been a string of weak systems, freeze–thaw cycles, and long dry spells that gnaw at an already-thin base. Weak layers fester—a design for failure. South-facing slopes reveal brush and talus. The mountains show their bones.
Then Presidents’ Weekend arrives, and with it, a shift. From Texas—far from our altitude—Elsa must have sung. Three days of heavy squalls follow, warm and wet. For the first time this winter, the stake measures in feet. It is not champagne powder; it drops dense and rimed, wind-loaded into slabs with an attitude. But it is snow. Riders pour into bowls and chutes, churning the thick stuff with a joy that overrides texture. Laughter skims across the ridgelines.
My client, A.B., and I spent the weekend threading tree lines, hunting pockets that the wind hadn’t touched. He’s a San Diego skier with the agility of a chamois—compact, quick, and unbothered by pitch. Over two winters, he’s shifted from guest to friend. On Monday we went looking for what the storm had hidden.
Beneath the still-roped-off Snow White, we found it: a few preserved turns, shaded and crisp, the kind of untouched snow that feels like a promise kept. We lapped it three times. The sound of our turns—soft, cohesive—felt like calligraphy laid gently across the slope. We started calling the pocket “Grandmother’s House,” a small domestic refuge carved into the chaos.
On our last run, another skier dropped in from above, eyeing a jump.
“How’s the landing?” he asked.
“Good,” we called back. “But give us a second—we’re right below it.”
He waited, then sent a front flip, landing low but solid. When he stood, snow dusting his shoulders, he grinned.
“Built it myself,” he said. Then, spotting the logo on my coat: “Don’t tell patrol.”
“We won’t.”
People love powder for the way it frees the body and lightens the mind. But powder is also instruction. A verb, not a noun. And in this instructive sense, the kidnapper in C.’s story isn’t mythic at all. It’s us—our carbon, our appetite, our insistence that winter bend to our timelines and our business models.
Avalanche forecasters read the snowpack like scripture: each storm a sentence, each crust a warning. A buried surface hoar layer is a velvet snare. A warm storm atop cold facets is a house built on marbles. They remind us that snow speaks a language available to anyone willing to listen. And right now, its message is inseparable from the one carried downstream by shrinking rivers.
Maybe we understood this intuitively as children: snowmaking was a sign of failure, not progress. Longer seasons mean more lift tickets, yes—but cost water, energy, and the illusion that the mountain owes us abundance. If we want snowfall to outlive us, stewardship must follow awe.
It doesn’t require grand gestures. Start with stories told on chairlifts, in lessons, in the quiet decisions that shape future winters. Start by admitting that nature will give as long as we stop insisting she give more. That the ribbon of death is not inevitable. That C.’s cardinal jacket should not be the brightest red on the mountain.
And when the dry spells stretch longer—as they will—we must not treat them as prophecy. We must resist the idea that winter is slipping away into artificial domes in New Jersey and Dubai. The mountains are not done. Winter knows how to return once we let her.
Somewhere, a lone cardinal sings.
Let it snow.