On Finitiation
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. We wait for the new medium to reveal itself, then move through it as best we can.
The lift stops. The water keeps going. And eventually, so do we.