Freeze/Thaw
The never-ever reaches past the hula hoop, grasping for my arm as his skis chatter down the bunny hill like loose change. He leans too far back, fighting the almost non-existent slope, the wedge he's aiming for crumbling beneath speed and fear. His legs are locked. His breath, shallow. He’s not falling, not yet—but he’s nowhere near standing tall.
“I’m going too fast!” he yells, panic cracking his voice as he slips away from my reach. “I can’t do this.”
He’s a college senior visiting from California, here with friends who drift over the snow like they belong to it. They grew up with family ski trips and don’t even remember making their first chairlift rides. Every time an avy bomb goes off unseen on the bowls high above, my student winces and ducks. His bikini and Hawaiian-shirt clad friends tease him affectionately before sliding off to ski the upper mountain without him. They aren’t locals, but they belong. He, in all his loaner gear, fears he does not.
During a water break, he tells me he’s been accepted to every law school he applied to, that the final choice will come down to aid packages. Then, a beat later: “I’m the first in my family to go skiing. And to go to college.”
He gazes toward the summit, imagining his friends in a Warren Miller movie. Suddenly, I realize that, for him, being here is not just about progressing from greens to blues. Ours is also a lesson in an unspoken language he was never taught, but wants to become fluent in.
“I really want to get good at this.”
By afternoon, everything’s changed. The crust of the morning softens into something looser, heavier. Snow piles in mounds that grab at his skis like greedy hands. The morning’s progress instantly melts. His skis stop cooperating. The turns that once almost held now vanish.
Over and over, he eats shit.
“I’m going too slow! I can’t do this.”
We sit in the warming snow, both of us sweating. The spring sun does not apologize.
“You are doing it,” I tell him. “The conditions just changed. That’s all. You’ve got to stop judging yourself so hard.”
By mid-March, rocks darken through thinning patches on the berms. Lost gloves and goggles resurface like forgotten relics of a long-gone winter. Meltwater trickles through narrow veins between the pines. A storm blows in, dumping eight or nine inches of snow, then quickly blows out. The mountain hums with transition.
Spring is a harsh ski teacher, full of both betrayal and revelation. The freeze-thaw cycle is relentless. Morning is crisp and fast, a mirror of certainty; afternoon, a sponge, soft and absorbent. What once held you steady now threatens to swallow you whole. Slush has no patience. It exposes the vulnerabilities in your stance, the way you lean back instead of forward. If you try to muscle your way through, you risk your ACL. You have to listen to your feet, to the burning in your thighs. Stay forward. Adjust. Let go of the day you thought you were supposed to be having.
We teach a lot of college students this time of year—young adults on the brink, many still benefiting from the safety net of their parents’ resources. They’re between the familiar homes they’ve left behind and the uncertain futures they’re about to build. They think they’ve come for a vacation, but really, they’ve come to feel the edge of their youth before adulthood comes rushing in.
Watching these young people learn to fall with grace, laugh at the slips, and stand back up is like watching snowmelt make its way toward a river. It’s a reminder of my own 20s, when everything felt in constant motion, racing toward a future I couldn’t yet discern. Like many, I once believed my transition into adulthood would be a perfectly groomed ski run, with an even fall-line and gradual descent, but the years have unfolded more like a poorly planned backcountry hut-to-hut tour, full of surprise storms, broken gear, unprepared companions, and avalanche risks.
These college kids come to learn from us, but in truth, every student is a teacher, bringing us back to the inevitability of change.
Soon, my familiar little corner of Breckenridge will vanish. The Peak 8 locker room—where boots de-funk on the dryers, stories are swapped, and winters find their continuity—will be torn down. Construction on a new hotel and condos starts next year, and we’ll move to a new basecamp on Peak 7. The metal benches, the table of random snacks, the warm chatter after a freezing day—it’ll all become memory.
Maybe the new locker room will be better. Maybe it won’t. Does it really matter? The snow doesn’t cling. Neither should we. That’s the mountain’s truth, especially in spring: everything shifts.
I’ve been lucky. I grew up with privileges I often take for granted—ski lessons, the latest gear, and a private education that came automatically, like snow in November. I never had to fight for my place on the hill. The locker room, too, was always there, a constant—a reminder that sometimes, privilege feels like the world just moves in your direction. Until it doesn’t.
The locker room clean-out reminds me that while privilege is real, it’s not necessarily permanent. Standing in front of the emptying ski racks, my heart catches like an edge on the heavy slush of nostalgia.
The indefatigable kids trotting off to après with their newly legit IDs remind me that maturing is a freeze and thaw cycle. We first learn to navigate the morning hardpack—the world feels solid, we move with speed and purpose (sometimes too much), sure we have all the answers. But then comes the thaw, and everything turns to mush. We’re pushed, we push back, unsure of where to turn next. Just when we get used to the slowdown, things speed up again. We fear we can’t control our next move as the frozen coral reef conspires with gravity to become almost unnavigable.
Your twenties become your thirties. Thirties become forties. Then fifties. We pick a law school. Maybe we graduate and clerk for a Supreme Court Justice. Maybe we drop out and become ski instructors. Parking lots become condos. Mountain bases get upgraded. Conditions thaw, freeze, and thaw again. Life’s never static, never still.
The beginner skier-lawyer’s friends reunite with us at the end of the lesson. They want to do one last run altogether. They are genuinely impressed with their friend’s progress and whip out their phones to film him in his triumphant, steady pizza. They slide down the green in a pack, backwards, while regaling him with tales of their upper mountain adventures, which they can’t wait to include him in next year. When we finish that last run—his face is sunburned and worn from effort, but a proud, genuine grin stretches across it.
“That was hard,” he says. “But more fun than I thought.”
I smile. “Yeah,” I say. “It usually is.”