Category: January

2019-2020 Season, Cannon Mountain, January

Setback (Part 1)

Just as the season has setbacks, so does my recovery. I knew it was going to happen. The seasonal setback happened going into this weekend. My personal setback would happen during the following weeks. Grinding out 12 work days in a row, half of them 13+ hour days, left me totally depleted. My routines were shot, my progress stalled. I accepted that it was going to happen and mentally prepared myself in advanced. Get through it and then get back on track.

My personal setback has been far less jarring than the seasonal set back. January suffered from winter’s multiple personality disorder in the worst possible way. Small snow accumulations, wash outs, rain/freeze events, cold blasts, a record breaking warm day. Some small snows but no big storms. We’ve had far worse January’s but it is still significantly worse than average. It is amazing we have as much open terrain as we have given the weather pattern.

2019-2020 Season, Cannon Mountain, January, Powder Day

2019 Retrospective

Cannonball

Ski Days & Blog Posts

During the first half of 2019, I gave up blogging. It wasn’t a deliberate choice per se, but the omission of an act is functionally the same as making a definitive decision. I ended the 2018 season with a write up about the State of TheSnowWay. That post might as well have been called “The State of my Life: Externalizing.”

TSW went radio silent from January-July of 2019. My first post of this year was in August, an externalized photography postmortem called Ubiquity & Bewilderment. The post ends “I’ve never posted less during a single season. Yet, I’ve never had more to say.” I knew something had gone horribly wrong. The thread was there. I just needed to summon the will to pull it.

In the State of TheSnowWay, I wrote that “Part of writing a blog is process. I love process. But I am no longer inspired by the blogging process.” By November 2019, I found my love of process again. Writing reinforces identity. What did my lack of blogging say about my identity? I wrote about recasting my tale in Narrative, the first TSW “trip report” written before the trip. Since then, every ski day of the current season has been accompanied by a blog post.

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2016-2017 Season, January, Jay Peak, Powder Day

Jay: New Year’s Day Powder

Face Chute

An overperforming storm combined with New Year’s Day hangovers and holiday crowds heading home to make for an epic first day of the New Year. Despite the forecast only calling for about four inches, the Jay Cloud delivered a solid foot with deeper drifts. While I was going to bed early and setting my alarm for 5:15am, a lot of other skiers were partying late and planning to sleep in. The vacationing holiday crowds were leaving early and who knows where the powder hounds were.

I went right at it with boot deep untracked down Can Am and then onto the Jet where I found more untracked boot deep in the trees for my second and third runs. Top to bottom boot deep untracked on a third run during a holiday weekend is something else. Despite knowing the reasons, I still couldn’t help but wonder how it was possible, how was this happening?

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2015-2016 Season, January, Jay Peak

Jay: Better Than It Had Right To Be

Despite receiving more snow than other northeast ski areas, Jay had no right to be skiing well during MLK Weekend. I kept my expectations low and was genuinely impressed with what I found on and off piste. Low expectations might be the single most important aspect of my season this year. At this rate, I might even remember 2015-2016 fondly despite likely having one of my lowest ski day totals in a dozen years. That said, I would dearly like to have my first powder day of the season sooner rather than later.

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2015-2016 Season, January, Jay Peak

Jay: This Will Begin to Make Things Right

Northwest Passage

The first seven words spoken in The Force Awakens are equally fitting for this weekend. After suffering through three horrific months, the season has been redeemed. This weekend may not have included the perfect dump that we all want. But it was far better than we could have hoped for and it was awesome when evaluated on its own merits. It was not perfect but still just what we needed: it got us excited and happy to be skiing again. The metaphor is strong with this report.

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