Omega Block
Too early in March, the lower mountain turned heavy. The upper thawed and froze. For a few hours each day, conditions were tolerable. We clung to scarcity, thinking, a few good turns is enough. And, maybe it’ll snow tomorrow. And, if we just keep trying, it’ll go back to how it was. But positive thinking manifested nothing. Once the base diminished, vegetation forced its way through the stillborn ice, claiming what remained of the season like an early grave.
By Easter week, the line at the base of Peak 7 bloated off a thin stripe of snow onto the dirt. Crowds bootpacked around the mud, some because they couldn’t get refunds; others, who flew in from tropical places, 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.”
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 persistent extremes: deluge or drought.
For us here in the High Rockies, it was the latter. 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 greeeted their bases like backhanded comments over breakfast. Core shots accrued, but stubbornness is often 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 incrimentally lost. Still, mountain dwellers declared their resilience. Hardcore. We kept going, throwing our lobster claws to the cloudless sky, proclaiming, “well, we can’t control Mother Nature!” Meanwhile, a thousand little Fireball bottles poke through the melt as evermore forest is rezoned to make way for condos.
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.
Then, a friend from a past life lived on the faraway island of Manhattan came to visit me.
It had been nine years since we’d last seen each other. He arrived from Florida like cumulonimbus, full of precipitation. It was after ten and the stars had cast their net over the river of 285 snaking through Fairplay. Hoosier Pass faded into the darkness of open flat, where dried deer pellets mix with pitbull shit and the people who make the resort run on the other side of the pass are able to afford a place to have a go at life. The lights of his rental car with the telltale tourist red plates flashed like an alien craft landing in the desert of friendship’s lost time. I raced out into the driveway and hugged him. It was the same hug I gave him that day almost ten years ago on E. 80th street when he drove up in his big white truck to say goodbye.
“You live in the bleekness,” he declared, looking around.
This young man (but not as young as the one I’d last seen) was clad in slacks and a quilted jacket; the paragon of parenthood, responsibility. He’d left the island first, driving west in that white truck to Arizona to restart the threads of an old life that suddenly seemed new after the twenty-something’s urban asphyxiation of dreams. It was before Covid, so he left with his memory of Manhattan in tact. In Tucson, he’d found his person, then started a business and a family. He’d recently relocated again. This time, to Florida.
That first night, he climbed up the carpeted ladder to the loft and chatted to me through the bars lining its edge. It was like he brought a version of me in his carry-on. This travel-sized me was layered in distant notions of time, which remains somewhere beneath the weak layers of shifting lives and experiences that have fallen and accrued since our last meeting. Even though I’m two careers later and he’s three small children deep, our time together was glacial, immovable. We drank Old Fashioned and pushed around pool cues like no time had passed whatsoever.
Night turned to morning, my first Sunday off since November, and we went on a long drive through the parched land I grew up calling home. The places or feelings I’d tried to convey to him years ago, in diners up and down the East Side or when we’d get on the M4 bus and just ride around. As we walked along the Eagle River, running like a pewter thread through the bustling town, talk of particulars dissolved. The old existential topics returned with insouciant thunderstorm rumblings: life after death, life on other planets, life then, life now, life twenty years from year now. Unlike some relationships, this friendship had no Omega Block. Even after all this years, the base not only remained, but it sustained growth.
Before he left for the airport, he said, “If we keep up this cadence, we’ll only see each other maybe three more times before we’re both dead.”
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 proper run where we take our beginners is named after him.
Inevitability closed in. After the anger, and the exhaustion, came not acceptance, but alignment. Winter cannot end since it never began. The dirt patches suddenly registered less like cancerous abrasions and more like spreading mycelium. Networks of recycled life branched and threaded their way across the slopes until the subterranean became surface: a surface being primed for something new.
The Chacos came out, allowing cramped feet to breathe. Part-timers exited their season early while full-timers cashed in sick days. No one went skiing with their extra time. The bikes were wheeled out and oar rigs loaded onto trailers parked in the sunshine. But patterns are persistent: as you move away from them, the more they try to black-hole you back in. Forecasters in Denver crowed about a mid-week storm, just in time for Gaper Day, but it was too late: the gaps are too big to be filled in now. The mountain’s motion of undoing had reached a critical point which could not be undone. Even three feet of snow could never repair the emotional and physical damage inflicted by a long season of relentless withholding.
So, what is the bleekness? Time. Change. Loss. The bleekness lies in the idea of the way things were versus the way they are now versus the way they “should” be. A kind of melting of self that reveals the dirt patches we’d prefer to cover up with artificial snow. A relationship that still goes on, even if it doesn’t. A job that lingers because of the fear of losing benefits.
Something or someone always eventually loosens the pattern’s grim, and Omega gives way to Alpha once more.