Ski Season Is Here!

It finally happened . . . ski season at Hidden Valley!

Man, I thought it would never get here but suddenly, Opening Day is behind us and there's 75 days of skiing to be had.

Saturday started with a couple of hours of free-skiing, catching up with Ski Patrol buds (Emilio, Charles, John, Hans, Ian, Gene and several others) . . . Man was it ever fun!

Then, at 2pm, Ski School for Newbie Instructors began led by Hawkie Moore. This guy's a stud - seriously. And not in a "too cool for the room" sort of way. He's just really good and really smooth and a real teacher. His task is to turn skiing-enthusiasts with some level of skiing capability into instructors good enough to safely take completely untrained "wanna be's" into wedge-stoppable capable skiers in 50 minutes.

The instructor class had about 10 of us, a couple of 'collegiates', several school teachers and of course, career guy that "just wants to have fun" this winter (that'd be me!).

Very odd thing started to happen, about an hour into Saturday's clinic I started to realize that my simple goal of "helping people have fun with this new thing they're doing called skiing" was really pretty short-sighted. While a reasonable and worthy goal, my focus really needs to be on making sure people get how much fun skiing can be and are able to do so in a safe and consistent manner. Yeah, I knew all of that 25 years ago but in the interim, I forgot that people allowing you to be their instructor is the highest complement they can afford you . . . in return, you promise to make sure they're safe and are going to have an enjoyable experience.

So, we spent several hours learning the 4 basics: Balance, Rotational Motions, Pressure and Edging and fought with Hawkie about them for the better of that time. Eventually, even thick-skulled me got how important the rotational motion element is in skiing and even I started to notice my technique improving towards the end of the day.

Then, it was time to go free-skiing!

Not that the clinic wasn't enjoyable . . . it was . . . but hey, I've got to start assimilating all this new knowledge and there's no better way than to cut a few turns.

So, off I went into an amazing sunset lift. Smartly, I didn't do any shooting while I was skiing, I think my ski patrol friends would have certainly found it amazing if I wrapped myself around a tree, camera in-hand. Didn't want to give them the pleasure of sledding me off the hill.

All I can say is, it's a great time to be a skier in St. Louis . . . this is going to be fun (and, it already is!).

Oh, one last thing to notice . . . the ski industry is definitely changing. I guess I never noticed how many ski-boarders there are but man, they're everywhere. You'll notice that in this picture, there's only one set of ski's (mine) and the rest are boards.

I'm not one of those skiers that shreds shredders, frankly, I think they're all pretty cool and especially since my daughter's are two of the best all-around shredders that I know, I really enjoy the scene.

Spent some time over at the terrain park, very cool stuff going on. Maybe, one day, if I'm brave enough . . . we'll see. It's kind of cool to be around when an industry is re-inventing itself. This winter's going to be a fun observation.

OK, you know the drill, email, or comment . . . enjoy!