Omega Block
Easter week. The line at the base of Peak 7 went beyond what was left of the snow, onto dirt. They bootpacked around the mud, some because they couldn’t get refunds; others because they don’t know any better. The concept of winter—what it should look like, and when it should end—is subjectively relative.
Up the chair, things were not much better. The trees teemed with porcupines and bears waking up too soon.
Some locals in t-shirts glanced up at Peak 6, gashed with rocks and portending wet slides. They shook their heads.
“It’s the fucking end, man. They should have called it weeks ago.”
Artificial snow
covers dirt we try to hide—
then melts us open.
Colorado’s worst ski season in recorded history unfolded like a toxic relationship. November love-bombed with snow-making. The hardpack was expertly, hastily laid, while the resorts rushed to open with promises of a solid foundation. But stoke alone is not enough to conjure the real stuff needed to make a base stick. Mother Nature doubled-down on avoidance. She withheld precipitation with a stubbornness easily anthropomorphized. Meteorologists have a name for this pathology: Omega Block.
“It is one of the many types of weather patterns that can set up and be stubborn to move…Sometimes they bring us great weather, sometimes not” (NOAA).
Like most patterns, the Omega Block’s roots are in the sky, about 15-18,000ft up—atmospheric superego. It takes its name from the final letter of the Greek alphabet (whose shape the system resembles when it parks over a landmass), and is synonymous with eschatological speak for THE END. An Omega Block bookends two low pressure zones with one high trapped in between. Not unlike the seesaw of doomed love, depending on which side you fall, you get one of two extremes: deluge or drought.
For us here in the High Rockies, it was drought all the way. The snow stonewalled. No amount of spoons under pillows or shot-skis could coax it out. What little did fall stuck just enough to the rocks to give the illusion of softness for a couple of bluebird days. Breadcrumbing, I think the therapists are calling it now.
Ignoring the evidence and being led by emotion, skiers slid hopefully into the variability. Rocks greeted bases like backhanded comments over breakfast. Core shots accrued, but stubbornness is met with stubbornness, particularly where desire is concerned, so out came the P-Tex and diamond stones.
The weeks frittered away, and idealized images of what winter should look slowly lowered thresholds for what’s considered “good.” What was promised never arrived. What little we had, was gradually lost.
How do you know when it’s the fucking end, man?
War broke out in the Middle East. Gas prices ascended alongside lift tickets. A federal antitrust class action law suit was filed against the megapasses alleging unlawfully inflated prices. Apocalyptic feelings abounded, exacerbated by an unprecedented heat dome over the western United States. Ninety-degree days on the Front Range. Ninety.
Peak by peak, the mountain shut down. The patches of see-through snow widened from windows into abysses so deep that grass began to reach through them. One of the mountain’s co-founders, Trygve Berge, died early in April. He was 93. The first green run where we take our beginners after the magic carpet is named after him.
The Omega Block lifted, just in time for Gaper Day. Forecasters in Denver crowed about a mid-week storm, but it was too late: the gaps are too big to be filled in now.