How much longer do we get to ski?

Ruminations of a Formerly Fanatic Skier

By Marjorie Smith, 2-01-07

With the glaciers disappearing in the Alps and Montana ski resorts delaying their opening days this season for lack of snow, I find the continuing building boom at places like Big Sky amazing. What happens to downhill skiing in this age of global warming?

Downhill skiing has always had a dreamy, déjà vu quality for me. It doesn’t matter where I’m skiing – at Big Sky or Bridger Bowl, in Hokkaido or Vermont, there will be a long, lovely run where I suddenly think, “Yes, I’ve been here before!” and then realize that I’m remembering an entirely different ski area on another continent. Even as a child, skiing at brand-new Bridger Bowl, I had a sense of having done this all before – even when I hadn’t. Perhaps it’s my Swiss ancestry – somewhere in my blood there must be a memory of sliding gracefully down snow-covered slopes, threading between snow-bedecked evergreens. Or perhaps it’s the result of learning to ski during my hyper-romantic junior high years, when everything was almost too meaningful to digest (the unbearable lightness of skiing?)

Déjà vu was, understandably, one of the major feelings that swept over me a few days after New Year’s this year when I found myself gliding down the slightly rocky slopes of Big Sky. Déjà vu along with a triumphant sense that I had regained my youth.

I hadn’t been downhill skiing for almost eleven years, since I broke my leg at Bridger one day in late March, 1996. It was my own damn fault. It was the first time I’d been skiing all year, the snow was wet and heavy, I was tired, but I decided on that proverbial one last run.

I heard a loud snapping sound as I made half of an awkward turn in deep heavy snow. I told myself the sound must have been my pole banging against the edge of my ski as I fell and I dragged myself back to my feet. But I couldn’t get my mind around the idea of trying the next turn. Somewhere deep within me, my self-preservation instincts balked. I flagged down a youngster and asked him to alert the ski patrol that there was a woman way off in the deep snow on the north edge of the area who needed help.

Later that evening, my mother called from Portland where she was visiting. “How was your day at Bridger?” she asked. She had reluctantly given up skiing two years earlier, after hip replacement surgery.

“It was great, until they had to bring me down on the toboggan,” I said.

There was a horrified gasp. “Margie!” she said with a sternness usually reserved for seventh-graders who haven’t cleaned their rooms. “No one in our family has ever come down on a toboggan.”

I tried to tell her that for a writer, it was a useful experience. Someday when I am writing a novel, I’ll need to know how it feels to be brought down the mountain headfirst on your back. She didn’t relent until I learned a few days later that it wasn’t just a severely sprained ankle, I had actually broken the tibia.

Although I usually get out on cross country skis a few times each winter, I hadn’t been on downhill skis until this month when the editor of the MSU alumni magazine assigned me to interview Dax Schieffer about his dream job as public relations manager for Big Sky Resort. I e-mailed Dax to ask when I could conduct a phone interview.
He countered with the suggestion that if I was supposed to be writing about the cool job he had, I should see him working and offered to treat me to a day on the slopes. It turned out to be one of the best-paying freelance assignments I’ve ever had, once you add up the cost of a day ticket at Big Sky plus the modern rental equipment Dax insisted on signing for so he wouldn’t have to be seen with someone using long, straight skis – to say nothing of lunch plus the priceless value of having my youth restored to me for a few hours.

A charming young man from Chile fitted me with boots. Sam, a young lady from Tennessee, picked out some skis for me. “I’m a blast from the past,” I told her, holding my hand high above my head. “When I learned to ski your skis were supposed to reach the base of your thumb.”

“Wow!” Sam said. “So how long were they?” as she selected a cute pair of 155 centimeter objects with on odd parabolic shape.

My old Hart metal skis were exactly two meters long, I told her. During my years in Hokkaido, when I stood in line for the gondola at Mount Teine with my skis on end beside me, they towered above the skis of all the Japanese. Even 25 years ago, people had taken to using skis that were shorter than their bodies.

In my Hokkaido days, I sometimes skied a run or two with a man who was one of the world’s most famous skiers of the day—Yuichiro Miura, the man who skied down Everest, as immortalized in an Oscar-winning Canadian documentary of the mid ‘70s. Miura-san ran the ski school at Mount Teine (site of the downhill events in the 1972 Sapporo Olympics), and he loved to come up behind me when I was in the gondola line and point and shout, “Su-kii no hakubutsu-kan! Su-kii no hakubutsu-kan!” which is to say “Ski museum! Ski museum!”

Getting assigned to Sapporo during my foreign service career was a major coup. As a teenager I couldn’t imagine not skiing every winter and my mother, who had taken up the sport at the same time as we kids did, used to say that it was a good thing she didn’t discover skiing until she was in her mid-thirties or she’d never have stopped to have kids. I went to college in ski towns (Denver and Bozeman) and when I married a Bostonian, we made as many forays up to New Hampshire and Vermont as we could afford.

Then we moved to Guam. When we returned to Montana after seven years in the Mariana Islands, there was a lot of skiing to be caught up on. I remember carrying my two-year-old daughter on my back skiing at Bridger and at a steep little area called Deep Creek somewhere near Anaconda. Then I moved to San Francisco and skiing had to wait for the very rare trip to Squaw Valley or a Christmas spent at home in Montana.

When I joined the foreign service and was assigned to Thai language training in preparation for a tour in Bangkok, skiing receded further from my reality. But my next post was Sapporo where skiing was even closer and more convenient than in Bozeman—for one thing, in Japan they sold by-the-ride coupons so you could go for a couple of runs and spend the rest of the day at work. I moved back to Bozeman after my Sapporo assignment was over, determined to continue celebrating winter as it was meant to be celebrated!

Except that by that March day in 1996 when I broke my leg, I was only hitting the slopes once or twice a year. I forgot about that this month as I followed Dax Schieffer around on the easy runs at Big Sky and listened to him talk about the various journalists he has escorted around the resort. Living in the moment that day, I believed this exuberant young man, who sincerely believes in the product he’s paid to sell, had restored me to my real life.

When I decided I’d challenged my nearly-atrophied skiing muscles enough, I thanked Dax profusely. “I should write about this day,” I told him. “Not just for the Collegian, but maybe an essay for New West. Something about getting back up on the horse that bucked me off.”

He wished me well and I drove back to Bozeman feeling wonderful. I could still ski. I was still a young, vital person! Next week I’d go up to Bridger Bowl.

It was about three days before reality finally hit. There was another reason I hadn’t been skiing for 11 years—the little matter of lift ticket prices. The last few years before the broken leg, I’d gone skiing with friends who worked at Bridger Bowl and at Big Sky, who had access to reduced-price lift tickets. Even though I can still organize my leg muscles to bring me safely down the slippery slope, I haven’t been able to organize my budget to afford lift tickets for years.

Sure, I make choices. But it’s a sobering thought that I’d have to skip two symphony performances or one opera performance (in Bozeman!) in order to buy a single day ticket at Bridger Bowl. I’d have to give up three and a half symphony concerts to finance one day at Big Sky.

Obviously there are lots of folks living on a different scale, enjoying Bozeman’s classical culture and skiing as well. Then there are the other folks on the slopes who are working low-paying jobs at the resorts just so they can get a ski pass. Perhaps keeping lift ticket prices sky-high guarantees the resorts an ample supply of schuss-besotted employees.

I’m glad I regained my youth that day on the slopes. I may even scrape together enough money to try a day at Bridger before the season ends. But I realize that unless I radically rearrange my financial situation (take a full-time job?) skiing can never be the essential part of my life it once was.

But then again – with global warming bearing down upon us, I’m circling back to my first point, like a skier getting in the lift line one more time. All that construction at Big Sky and Moonlight Basin and at every other ski area in the Rockies – perhaps those mountain mansions will hold their value when folks start moving to the Rockies to keep their feet dry as the seas of the world rise. Whether they’ll be skiing out their front doors seems a little less clear.

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