Not tagging today as a powder day was a difficult but honest decision. This is a testament to both how poor the season has been and how great the skiing was today. Jay received one inch, which seems to have become the new foot. But drifts were much deeper, blown in snow was abundant, and untracked snow could be found all day long. I have never had more fun skiing a supposed one inch of new snow.
I will never understand skiers that dive straight into the woods on first chair. There are few things I long for more than blasting powder turns down a flat, steep, and wide open pitch. Don’t get me wrong, I love trees. And I enjoy bumps when I can’t ski powder. But there is nothing like a steep groomer blanketed with untracked powder. It is far more rare than untracked powder through the trees.
On my first run, I found almost half a foot of untracked blower on top of scraped hardpack. A delightful surprise that affirmed my destination decision. I shamelessly made wide arcs across the entirety of JFK. A farmer harvesting the carefully planted crop I was not. The feeling of my skis planing up and surfing the fresh was sublime. The feeling of my edges engaging the hardpack at the apex of my turn was not.
Stick Season in New England continues with more cautious exuberance at Mad River Glen. Perhaps a little too much exuberance and not enough caution but can you blame a guy that is snuffing out half a foot of untracked days after the storm? I was hoping for a reasonable amount of relatively safe tree skiing. Despite the untracked heroics, even I had to question how to define reasonable.
Cross blocking skills were not optional in the trees at Jay this weekend. All of Jay’s Stateside glades are open excepting Deliverance and Canyonland. But I was more excited about having so much off map tree skiing available. Cautious exuberance, with poles held high, yielded an exceptional amount of tree skiing. There is no doubt about it: stick season is officially open at Jay.
At some point, I lost my sense of anger. I thoroughly deconstructed and rebuilt myself but I deconstructed more than I rebuilt. I was unable to manage more than stoic outrage.
The ability to channel anger into positive action is amongst the most powerful movers of humanity; the ultimate resolution of something positive out of something negative. But the basic ingredient of such powerful change, anger, had eluded me for years.
A resolution is a commitment to resolve an identified problem; to bring about lasting change. But resolutions are merely statements of intent doomed to failure. Making a resolution because of a date on the calendar without associated thought pattern and habit changes is not only foolish but dangerous, dooming oneself not only to failure but also the resulting depressive self doubt.
Four weeks ago I reached a critical moment. I sat in an endodontist’s chair staring at an x-ray of a broken tooth, weighing my options, none of which seemed very good. The endodontist remarked that dentistry is nothing more than applying temporary solutions to inevitable decay and failure. He was speaking of his profession and my choices. But I heard something much more profound.
I haven’t had a drop of soda since that moment. Year after year, Doctors told me that I needed to fix my diet. But it took a costly broken tooth and associated life long problems to birth lifestyle changes. Instead of resolving to do something, I ingrained a different mental paradigm resulting in habit changes. I finally found my anger and brought it against my will forcefully and conclusively.