The Longest Lap
IT’S EASTER WEEKEND, and Peaks 9 and 10 have already surrendered. The ski-in/ski-outs are advertising half-price suites, and the Front Range has migrated—predictably—to bikes, bouldering pads, and early patio culture. But winter, for once, refuses to exit on schedule.
In twenty-four hours, temperatures swing from the fifties to a foot of powder, the kind of late-season storm that briefly restores everyone’s faith. My client and I head toward the T-bar, the most direct route to the soft, untouched alpine. A patroller intercepts us with the neutrality of someone delivering routine bad news.
“Motor’s shot,” he says. “Waiting on a part. Could be a week.”
The translation is obvious: the shortcut is gone. The powder is obtainable—just not conveniently. What should have been a five-minute tow becomes a three-lift commute through the mountain’s receding infrastructure. The snow is heavy. The legs are tired from a winter’s accumulation of miles, not just today’s.
It would be easy to say, Next time. But the calendar doesn’t allow for next times anymore.
Lately I find myself thinking less in “seasons” and more in migrations. Skiers move without calling it that—toward storms, toward work, toward some temporary version of home. Wildlife is more transparent: Beaver Creek closes early to keep its elk undisturbed; in Maine, where I’m headed next, alewives will soon push upstream to spawn. This time of year, everyone is rearranging themselves according to some internal barometer.
For instructors at Peak 8, the locker room has long been a wintering ground—a place to dry boots, stash snacks, and conduct the low-level social rituals that keep the cold months moving. This year, its tenure is over.
“Everything out by end of day,” a supervisor calls down the aisle. One cubby is missing its door; its former occupant removed it, sentimentally or impulsively, to take home. “They’re coming with pickaxes Monday.”
The dismantled locker and the broken T-bar share a logic. We occupy patterns—routes to powder stashes, preferred lines through bumps, a familiar spot to buckle boots—until the mountain reclaims them. Some changes are announced; others simply happen.
My client and I thread our way through mid-March crowds on a mountain that is already half-closed. With all the detours, our lifts multiply. The extra time above snow makes conversation unavoidable. After two seasons of skiing together, I realize we’ve quietly crossed from professional rapport into friendship. At the top of Imperial, we get what we came for: one last descent through the thick remnants of winter on Whale’s Tail and Horseshoe Bowl. The lap is long and inelegant, the kind that deters casual skiers. For those willing to make the detour, solitude rewards the stubborn.
Back in the locker room, I compare notes with another instructor, both of us scraping wet snow from our bases, trying to assess how many rocks we’ve struck.
“Find anything good in the Easter egg hunt?” she asks.
“All the rocks,” I say. “Every single one.”
We laugh, but it’s a placeholder. What follows is not comedy but packing: goggles, gaiters, lesson books, handwarmers, sunscreen. The practical inventory of a season that, in a matter of hours, will be erased by construction equipment.
The comparison to the puffins of Eastern Egg Rock is literal enough to resist metaphor, but the parallel persists. Once their nesting ground disappeared, they stopped returning. Decades later, after a complicated, improbable intervention, they came back. Home, it turned out, was not a fixed location but a pattern that could be relearned.
On my first visit to Midcoast Maine two autumns ago, I boarded the Audubon puffin boat as a tourist with no agenda beyond seeing something small and improbable. I didn’t know then that I’d be working there as a sea-kayak guide, paddling the same waters the puffins reclaim each summer. What felt incidental turned out to be directional.
With the Peak 8 locker room headed for demolition, the symmetry is hard to ignore. One habitat disappears; another emerges before you realize you’ve begun inhabiting it.
Ski season fades; paddling season stirs. The uniform is already in a heap by the door. It shouldn’t feel like an ending, but endings rarely ask permission.
Outside, a western meadowlark settles in an aspen along the Blue River. It’s an understated herald—birds, at least, don’t dramatize transition. Migration isn’t linear. It loops, fragments, and occasionally doubles back. The body learns the pattern first; the mind takes longer to accept that movement, not permanence, is the closest thing to home.