A Visit To Lost Winter
Detour to Banff.
―
In Banff, the mountains are so big they could swallow Colorado. Canada is winter’s prodigal daughter.
The road from Alberta climbs out of sweet grass flats. Here, on Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, the gas is prepaid in liters. The pass narrows into twilight. Ahh! There’s the lost snowpack. Winter’s deep roots never died, they were just north of the border, buried on the other side of the Omega Block.
Alive snow shifts on the strange, humongous faces. Wind cries with the wolves, stiffening the pack. Sky-splitting peaks with their unfamiliar aspects pierce my heart and make me weep tears of snow.
We check into an AirBnB in Cranmore. The old cabin layered of lacquered logs sits 45 degrees to the road. The woodstove is big as a gondola but there’s no need to use it because forced air blows like a tropical wind through the house.
I find a ramen place for dinner and slot into the booths beneath murals of ski-themed manga. The broth slides steamy down the throat. For dessert, there’s mochi.
Lake Louise has bowls that hold all of you. Bigger than your biggest Super-G turns; they make our Horseshoe Bowl look like a snack. It’s midweek, but the sun’s out and the parking’s free, so the mountain buzzes with enough energy to make it feel like February.
100% terrain open. There’s the boomerang road, that ring of mountain that zips up along out-of-bound ribs before swooshing down toward the ridgeline’s hips. I follow the local kids who dart like sparrows into unmarked trees. They fly me to a rock garden where little boulders offer endless lips to launch off.
I sink into snow
ptarmigan fading from sight—
no one has to know.
Top of the World chair whisks to a realm of rock and snow. Steeps that bind the throat are accessed by Paradise, an old triple fixed grip dangling high over a vast bowl. There’s no footrest, and the lowered bar offers a gap wide enough for a human torso to slip through.
By the third lap, I get used to it.
At 3:25, I ride up with a guy from lift ops. The chair stops over the belly of the bowl. A tendon of rope below wriggles in the wind that wings its way into my belly. This mountain is not part of the mega corporation I belong to, but he’s dressed in black, just like our guys do.
I tell him where I come from and how shitty our season was. The chairlift ninja grins, and replies:
“We all have bad years
winter shits the bed sometimes—
it was just your turn.”
Omega Block
I personify the weather.
―
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.
Operational Update
As discussed around the mountain.
―
As discussed around the mountain:
Records
Shallow snowpack fades
Tourists vanish with the lake
Locals hit food pantries.
Hibernation
Mama and two cubs
Race across Trygve’s open face
Too early to wake.
Terrain Status
Patrol ropes go up
Peak by peak, Breckenridge sleeps
Runs close like old books.
Closing Day
“Hey team,” Broomfield writes,
“Things are dynamic out there—
Stand by for updates.”
Afternoon Walk At Lake Dillon
Sasha rolls in the mud.
―
After being cut at lunch, I took Sasha to Lake Dillon. We parked the car at the marina beside the sailboats moored like zoo animals, with no possibility of currents or crossings. It was 71 degrees by 2 P.M.—the sixth time in seven days Summit County has set a record for this time of year. I put on my Chacos, and let the dog nose our way to the water. We squished through the reaches of mud between us and the shy lake, who had retreated deeper into her bed than I’ve ever seen before.
The papers proclaim:
“Lake Dillon froze late—
ice melt device fell through,
before two months passed.”
When snowpack lets go early, the watershed exhales winter too soon. Warm days like this one accelerate the melt, and tributaries reach out like arms to rake down the thawing soils. Instead of soaking in with all the nutrients, the water’s pulse runs off downslope. This overland flow elopes with silts and clays, hastily deposited in cloudy fans at the water’s edge.
Aristotle wrote of watersheds in 350 B.C.E. in his treatise Meteorologica (Book I, Chapter 13) that mountains are porous. Giant sponges that retain and release water.
Organic debris, mainly uprooted willow, colonize the wrists and elbows of these tributaries. This skeletal vegetation strews about like tumbleweeds on the Nebraska highway. Sasha seizes one with her teeth, and drags it toward a finger of stream.
A red nun and the NO WAKE SIGN direct my steps on the expanding shore: navigation aids to nowhere. A couple with a black labrador stroll out to an island I’ve paddled to before.
“Boating season will be majorly compromised.”
The Summit Daily says 160 slips will be unavailable on the reservoir’s Frisco side. The boatless platforms stretch like Roman aqueduct ruins, their arteries silted.
Sun on Tenmile Range,
mountains, vast and porous, hold
water, then let go.
Half-Days
Souvenirs from a shitty season.
―
November.
Our new locker room occupies a hastily built-out corner of the Grand Colorado’s garage. There are no windows, so it smells of exhaust and feet. Returning pros squabble about where to put the computers and the vending machines, but everyone agrees there are not enough benches or places to put the skis.
A construction site behind the Magic Carpet swallowed our old home over the summer. Broken ground leaks diesel plumes into the learning area. When the wind turns north, they carry all the way up to Trygve's Platter, which isn’t running yet anyway. Through peepholes in the construction fence we glimpse bones being laid for the resort’s first five-star hotel: The Imperial Hotel and Alpine Chalet Residences. Embedded in its 70,000 foot sprawl will be the “Sky Domes,” glass geodesic houses where high-net worth individuals can dine and stargaze. For now, though, it’s just a big dirty hole.
Blue jackets swing on hooks. Boot dryers hum, filling the air with their familiar musk. The pros trickle in but the snow does not. A week is all it takes to shred the “White Ribbon of Death” to a shoelace. It feels more like April than November.
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.
December.
Thirty-seven of 193 trails open. An 18” base. Daytime temperatures squat 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.
The hollow statue of the Norse god Ullr stands motionless at the base of Peak 8. His bow drawn, his arrow aims at a widening patch of dirt beneath the Colorado SuperChair. Kids slither around sharks—rocks hidden like prizes between moguls—and micro-forests that push up defiantly through the white stuff we’ve paid dearly to make.
Exasperated instructors confiscate skis and send groups of advanced kids one-footed down the greens. The sups laud such creative pedagogy, but the parents are not impressed. Lesson prices have gone up. A full-day private now starts at around $1300. A half day at $900.
“We’re in a donut,” lament the locals in bars. “The snow is hitting everywhere all around us. East, West, they’re all getting pounded. But not us.”
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 rush of what’s supposed to be winter.
A persistent ridge of high pressure has diverted more storm tracks north. On Christmas Day, rain falls on Main Street.“Variable” isn’t just a euphemism for bad snow. It’s overworked bodies. Dwindling work. And rent that won’t quit.
January.
The donut shows no signs of abating. The apps show a 30” base at Breck, 70” at Hunter. Let’s not even mention what’s occurring at Jay Peak or in Vermont. The resort’s social media team burns overtime. As the weeks slip, they go from posting white rooms money shots taken last season (presumably to entice March bookings) to addressing the blight directly.
Look! We are so authentic! Come and have fun with us despite the shit conditions! Skiing’s not about quality or quantity! It’s all about who you slide with. Look! Here’s an adorable avy dog in training! Aren’t the views, like, so pretty?
In a week, the resort will have used all its state allocated water for snowmaking. While the local news quietly covers the debate about opening a thirsty new data center on the Western Slope, passholders are told not to worry about the snowmaking. The resort will buy reserves from the town. And where (everyone thinks but dares not ask), when that runs out, will the town buy its reserves from?
One Thursday, I ride the gondola down with a Boomer instructor after another day of no lessons. His beard is the color of refrozen snow and his Carhartts have holes in them; he wears the uniform of the veteran ski bum well. He smiles correctively at me when he asks how my season is going and I respond honestly.
“Don’t be so dower, dear. It’s great to have all this time to free ski! I took the day off to telly.”
He grins at me like a guy who bought real estate here in the 80s.
“You know,” he continues, “there was a winter like this once. Back in the early ’80s, before snowmaking. Breck shut down for a month. Then it dumped. Absolutely nuked. And when it did, we had the biggest spring I can remember.”
(Of all the words skiers use to talk about snow, that one— nuke—is the one I hate most).
One by one, my regulars cancel.
“So sorry,” they apologize, “but we’ve decided to go to Mexico this year. Hope you get some snow soon!”
Beginners take their place. My schedule fills up with the half-day privates that are all the rage these days. Value is squeezed like blood from stone in a sport synonymous with money. The culture around skiing seems to have shifted with the climate but here both subjects are mostly verboten. There is only Stoke, Send, and Slut Strands.
The Magic Carpet churns while prayers for inches resound through the county at night. The bars fill up and the restaurants report a boost in earnings. Across Vail Pass, in Eagle County, the southern facing aspects soak up so much sun they’ve stayed completely bald. Squirrels and chipmunks chatter on the treed fringes of blue groomers, and confused moose stumble out onto the runs at Peak 9. Birdsong, not normally heard til closing week, trills in the air.
February.
The Olympic torch burns through Cortina. And just like that, the world is enamored with winter sports again. Lindsey nearly loses a leg and Mikaela reclaims the glory that eluded her in Beijing. Everywhere but here, it seems, the skiing skies on.
Suddenly, the water for snowmaking is all gone. The sun gnaws what’s left into afternoon slush, which promptly congeals overnight. Patrol shuts down runs previously opened. Collisions after collision make local headlines. One bro at Keystone rushes a tree so hard that he loses an eyeball, then promptly sues the goggle company.
Prayers for powder dissolve into hushed chatter about summer. The experts say the threshold has already been passed to generate enough snowpack to see us safely through fire season. The runoff will limp along. Whatever does slip into the river beds will disappear quick. Lake Dillon, which hydrates the Denver metro area and didn’t freeze until this month, sleeps fitfully under her thin cover. She tosses beneath her thin sheets of ice like a child with a fever. It is announced that Frisco will close the marina’s dock and public boat ramps for the summer.
Just in time for President’s Day, patrol drops rope on T-Bar. There’s dirt in the track on the way up, and crowns of rock complicating all entrances to the bowl.
“Can we go ski up there?” the kids ask.
I shake my head. “Not today.”
Even the old timer isn’t taking days off to telly anymore.
On Finitiation
Ski school is ending.
―
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.