Op-Ed: How Fatherhood Changed My Relationship To Skiing

The only way the sun could be described on this spring day was brilliant. Puddles emerged from megalithic snowbanks as the star’s warmth imbued all at the terminus of its 93-million-mile path. Birds sang of renewal. But though the ski season had weeks ago ended, the five-hundred-foot local hill was still choked with snow. Its lone fixed-grip chair, now sitting silent and still, had churned gallantly during what had been a winter for the ages. 

There and at the resort across town, all season long, the townsfolk had reaped a bountiful, endless harvest of powder. Plow drivers were run ragged while snow riders were overjoyed. Office kitchenettes echoed the town over with the glass-pressing braggadocio of desk jockeys who had seemed, en masse, to have embraced a new routine of starting work at 10am, while those with night shifts burned the candle at both ends. What a season to be a waiter. By April, many a vitamin-D deficient soul proclaimed with sunken eyes and strong quads that enough was enough, just give me a day with sun, dammit. And on this spring day, the sun was out in all its glory.

I didn't quite get to enjoy the winter like I would have in the past. Being the father of a wily and beautiful one-year-old, I had new-found responsibilities that took me from almost all things skiing. Gone were ten-thousand turn Saturdays followed by heavy après happy hour(s). Touring for powder in the mornings with my mates before skiing all afternoon with my wife had been my reality only recently, yet now felt like it had happened to somebody else; had taken place far away, perhaps on another world.

I immediately loved being a dad. But the only way I could get my turns in with any regularity now was via 5:30 am resort tours; moments for myself carved from time I would have otherwise been getting my seventh and eighth hours of sleep. 

At first it seemed my morning skiing would have a fairly normal cadence. Maybe I would tackle the two thousand vertical feet a few times a week. But the snow came early. And then it came often. And it didn't hurt that my friend Brendan joined nearly every day. Journeys undertaken with friends had become something rare–my phone now seldom rang since my child emerged into the world. But Brendan's presence was stalwart.

So we toured on crisp, dark mornings, some with more stars than I had seen even in a planetarium. But more often than not–and usually after snowblowing a few feet of fresh off my driveway at 4:00am–we toured under skies choked with falling snow. We hiked, then headlamp skied our one, long, steep run in powder almost daily; faceshots came and went with each turn as the town below slowly emerged out of the dark clouds, sepia street lights glowing ephemerally like out of a dream.

The snow was relentless, and we eventually tired of the routine. Sleep-deprived and itch scratched raw, we told ourselves we had had enough. But then it would snow again. And I would clear the driveway. And Brendan and I would find ourselves once again two thousand feet above town before sunrise, skiing the lightest and deepest of snow. Eighty times we made that journey over the course of the winter, each time a slightly different revelation. Each time made possible by the camaraderie built on sacrificing a little bit of sleep for a lot of snow.

But then the season was over, and the sun was back. My morning routine with Brendan was now replaced with a new pattern, this time based on solo lunch breaks not at the resort but at the little ski hill right in town, a lucky five-minute walk from work. That day, I put on my two-buckle tele boots, shouldered my fish-scaled XCD skis mounted with three-pin bindings, and scurried over to the little mountain, still snowbound but now closed for the season.

Forgoing skins, helmet, and shirt, I switchbacked up the small but steep hill under the gift of spring sunshine. Reaching the top always proved a little sporty and challenging. Instead of determinedly pointing my skis straight up the hill I was nudged toward finding the most efficient route up; the ascent here was a conversation with the terrain instead of the absent-minded, time-trial vanquishing of it I had become accustomed to on the resort during the mission-oriented winter. Finally atop the little mountain, the time usually spent transitioning was replaced with slowly breathing in the view of town, now bright, warm, close.

With no skins to remove or binding mode to change, the choice to descend came almost cosmically–something esoteric to our understanding gently compelled me to move. My slow, straight, sliding start on the soft corn was quickly punctuated by the need to control the unwieldy skinny skis. The steepness required jump turns, and the cableless three-pin bindings gave little resistance. In each lunging lead change, slightly aloft, there was a long moment of weightlessness before the skis came back to earth and the sole of the boot engaged into the telemark turn; a time when no force was acting upon me except for gravity–lonesome and free.

Our world of downhill skiing holds so many delights, many of them unknowable until the counterweight of fate thrusts us towards them. A forced routine of skiing in the pitch black of morning save for the crescent moon is not often our calling, nor is a free-heel reimagining of downhill skiing’s expectations during lunch breaks from work. The mosaic of these experiences mirrors that of life, where the sweetest joys are often those found serendipitously while we improvise. Much like the wild joy of being a father; like the stunning luck those of us who get to ski have somehow stumbled upon. 

Everybody should be so lucky.