My youngest son Thomas now lives in Denver. There are lots of reasons that he and his wife moved there last year, but one of the big reasons I suspect is ent many young people gravitate to Colorado…for the skiing. All three of my children were raised on spending their winters skiing, mostly in Park City, Utah, where I kept a ski house for fifteen years. In my day, I used to spend 35-45 days a year on the slopes of Deer Valley. My summer sport was always golf and my winter sport was skiing.
I first put on a pair of skis when I was twelve and living in Wisconsin. But that was literally just a matter of strapping some old bear-trap bindings on my boots and sliding down about ten feet of lightly snow-covered Midwestern slope. I really started skiing when we moved to Maine in 1965. I spent two years skiing almost every day (weekends AND weekday nights) while I lived in Maine. Those two years really locked in both my golf game and my skiing ability. My the time we moved to ROme in 1968, I was ready to get my first pair of good skis. For Christmas that year I got a pair of 215cm (VERY long by today’s standards) Kneissel White Star skis with all-steel Look-Nevada bindings and red long-thong safety straps. The world had also graduated from tie leather boots to plastic buckle boots (Nordicas if I recall correctly). It is quite a set-up. The length of the skis made you very fast. The weight of those heavy skis and bindings made you strong (carrying them was no mean feat). But mostly, the overall size of those skis made you very good at maneuvering on the slopes. Those boaters did more for my ski form than anything else I ever did on the ski slopes. All the skis I owned and used after that were so much easier to ski on that skiing seemed easy by comparison to lugging those things around the slopes.
After a few winters of skiing in Italy (the Apennines on the weekends at Termanillo, the Dolomites a few times a year at Cortina and San Martino de Castrozzo, and once a year with the family at Zermatt in the Swiss Alps), I headed for college and other priorities. I did ski a few semesters at Greak Peak, but then after school I pretty much stopped skiing for a few years until the 1980 Winter Olympics at nearby Lake Placid brought the sport back into focus. I started skiing occasionally in Vermont and even the Berkshires. Then, in 1987 I Skied at LaParva in Chile and then with a gang of my Latin American crew at Sundance in Utah, and I was hooked again. I skied a few more times in Utah with my colleagues and then decided that life was too short to not have skiing back in my life as much as possible. I bought a ski condo on the Deer Valley mountain in 1992 and did not look back for the next fifteen years. I traded that condo in a few years for a big ranch house in the Snyderville Basin. That was sold and traded for an elegant condo in Park Meadows. Then, in 1998, with my big Bankers Trust payday, I bought the BIG ski house in Park City. It was 11,000 square feet and was done in the Frank Lloyd Wright style of architecture. I owned that monster for five great years over the turn of the Millennia. It served me well as a host house during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Park City. Interesting that my ski career restarted with the 1980 Olympics and started wrapping up with the 2002 Olympics.
Once I met Kim (she was not a skier), I was starting to get over my ski Jones. I sold the BIG house and traded down to a smaller ski house on the Park CIty Golf Course. All five of those Park City ski houses served their purpose of giving me great winter ski access to the best and lightest powder snow in the world. They all also gave me a base of operation to teach all of my children how to ski and make it a part of our shared love of winter. I sold the final ski house in 2007, just before the real estate crash and that ended my ski career. I had skied hard for many years and enjoyed it with lots of gusto, but I had had my fill. I’m glad that all of my kids came to love skiing as well. Roger was a very smooth-dude with ankles that stuck together like they were glued. Carolyn never loved it, but she liked it enough to go along every day and skiing most every slope on the mountain with us. She appreciated it enough to introduce both her daughters to the sport and still takes them occasionally for salt day in the Poconos or Catskills. But it’s Thomas who has really stayed with it and now especially with his move to Colorado.
I get vicarious pleasure out of watching his ski videos on Instagram as he sets his and Jenna’s runs to music. He has a gang of ski buddies from high school, college and now from Colorado. Just this week he has really activated the mountains of my memories because he is skiing in Utah for the week. He is staying at our friends’ AirBnB at the base of Emigration Canyon, so he is skiing Snowbird, Alta and Brighton, which he can access using his Ikon Ski Pass. These days skiing has become so expensive that the only way young people can afford it is by buying multi-area passes like the Ikon Pass. It so happens that pass does not include Deer Valley, so its ironic that the place where he learned to ski all those years we lived in Utah, he cannot afford to ski as an adult. It doesn’t seem to have impacted his enjoyment from what I can see of the videos. And for certain, his videos give me great joy in vicariously gliding down the slopes of my memory.