The Variable
Ullr Fest has come and gone. The world-record shot ski reclaimed, the bonfire lit. Still, the statue of the Norse god stands motionless at the base of Peak 8, bow drawn, arrow aimed at a widening patch of dirt beneath the Colorado SuperChair. Kids slither around sharks—rocks tucked between moguls—and micro-forests that push up defiantly through what snow persists. Exasperated instructors confiscate skis and send one-footed groups down the greens. In Broomfield, the corporate wizards reach for euphemism: variable, packed powder, early-season conditions. But it isn’t early season. It’s Christmas week—the first peak rush of what’s supposed to be winter.
What’s happening isn’t mysterious. A persistent ridge of high pressure has diverted storm tracks north. Daytime temperatures sit above freezing at base elevation, refreezing weakly at night, if at all. Snowmaking fills narrow wet-bulb windows, laying down dense, artificial ribbons that abrade quickly under holiday traffic. Natural snowfall hasn’t built depth; it sublimates, melts, or compacts back into dirt. Thirty-seven of 193 lifts open. An eighteen-inch base. Winter exists, technically—but unevenly.
“Don’t worry,” D. tells me when I ride the gondola down with him after a day of no lessons. He’s an older instructor, the sort who seems to have been here since wooden skis. Someone I’ve known without really knowing—an enduring presence in the kids’ ski school. “There was a winter like this once, back in the ’80s, before snowmaking. We shut down for a month. Then it dumped. And when it did—we had the biggest spring I can remember.”
The new locker room sits beside the Grand Colorado garage. The hated uphill slog of our old home is memory, replaced by a brand-new basecamp that’s small, poorly ventilated, and short on benches. The laughter and rituals carry over, but our common table is gone. So is the bathroom. Everything feels compressed—a contraction that never names itself as downsizing. We’re seasonal workers in an industry calibrated to weather, and weather has become less reliable.
Back in November, amid the locker-room reorganization, I moved into an unfinished basement room like a fully grown adult child returning home between jobs. Several instructors moonlighted as contractors (or maybe it’s the other way around). They were working to finish the space before the main workforce arrive. Lockers stood loose from the walls. Boot dryers were shoved into a corner, their hoses arcing into nothing. One instructor wielded a drill wearing a sweatshirt from the race camp I attended on Mt. Hood as a kid.
“Where’d you get that?” I ask.
“Oh, I coached there back in the day. A lot of us did. D. founded it.”
The next day, I told D. I was a camper—more than twenty years ago. We traded names and dates. One coach lives in Switzerland now; D. visited him a few summers back. He tells me about building the A-frame cabin where we slept—the steps where my friends and I practiced Britney Spears dance routines. We remembered lunches on the glacier, rafting the Chutes where no kid stayed dry, the end-of-camp cookout. Wandering old-growth forest, sweaty palms linked with boys.
After work, I went to my storage unit and did some personal archaeology. In my hands: a bright purple photo album from my first summer at Hood. Cut-and-paste photos of preteens with raccoon eyes, speed suits paired with shorts, helmets discarded on the glacier. I showed them to D the next morning. He studied my awkward, pubescent face—puka shells, Abercrombie tees—then said, “I remember you. You haven’t changed much.”
I smiled. I remember him too, vaguely—five in the morning, making announcements while we packed sandwiches before piling into the van to ride up to the Magic Mile. We skied only in the mornings; by afternoon the snow was too soft. Then we became regular campers again, heading into Government Camp for huckleberry milkshakes, letters home, sneaking into the snowboard camp to use their PlayStations. Remembering those summers now makes me feel old.
Variable isn’t just a euphemism for bad snow. It’s time. Bodies. Jobs. Infrastructure. The way memory surfaces without warning and returns you to a version of yourself you almost forgot.
The locker room is finished. Blue jackets appear on hooks. Boot dryers hum, filling the air with their familiar musk. Still, the snow doesn’t come. I return from another lower-mountain lesson, sixth toe burning, wearing only a thin base layer beneath my uniform, unsure what the uniform is for.
On the hook of my locker hangs a patch of white: a hoodie from the 1990s. From my old ski camp.