Oops
I love to joke about skiers, snowboarders, and resorts racing to get to opening day before everybody else each year. And I do get it. When I was in college, Labor Day took on an entirely different meaning for me because I knew I could score the last season’s cheapest gear. It was exciting but at the same time torture. Here I was in early September with a brand new pair of boots or sticks and if I was lucky I’d be jumping on a chairlift in around 90 days. I’d pray for a small Tahoe ski area like Homewood to buck the trend and open for business in October but that never happened.
Now though, resorts can’t wait to be first. And I chuckle at how psyched my old self would have been to fly down some of the grass hills with patches of snow that we see for opening days now — 50 degrees and firing.
I’m reminiscing about all of this because skiing and snowboarding, unlike surfing, can and will make you sit through months of yearning for the slightest chance at a few turns. Surfers get it. But unless you’re completely landlocked, those urges are satiated pretty easily. You might sit through one summer flat spell that lasts three weeks at worst. And even in those trying times, we’re all happy to grab some brown, waterlogged groveler or longboard and splash around in knee-high waves.
And that brings us back to skiing in places like New Hampshire’s Tuckerman Ravine. East Coast resorts are ghost towns come April and May, leaving Mount Washington’s snowfields as one place where the people hike for off-season turns. So here we are in June and the snowfields are exactly what you’d expect: rocky and brown. One East Coaster posted a video of a “rookie mistake” on Reddit this week and you can see the conditions, which also means you can feel the froth this group has to be out making turns in June. And that “rookie mistake” turns into a rocky yard sale.
