By Merisa Sherman
Floating along, wiggling your body to the rhythm of the ridiculously buried natural features that only two days ago would have absolutely ripped a nasty core shot into your bases. But not today. Today, you cannot see any of that and are just floating through the woods, grabbing all the fresh, untouched you can at a speed that would make Lewis Hamilton proud. It is glorious, the fresh powder sitting atop everything and anything, a dream world where the white blanket is so thick you begin to wonder how Mother Nature ever came up with the idea.
But you don’t have time to think about that, as there’s so much snow the trees haven’t often been trimmed this high, especially since you’re skiing in places that you only get to go a few times in your lifetime. You’ve got to focus, protecting your face from the branches whipping around you. It’s not a regular snowstorm on top of a sad base, it’s a multi-day storm on top of a very good base.
And then — poof! One turn sends you deeper into the snow that you could possibly have imagined. You feel like perhaps you have jumped off the diving board into a pool of goose feathers, but even that doesn’t describe the feeling of floating along until you sink all the way to a bottom that isn’t really there anyway.
Your weight gets shifted into the front, fast and hard as your skis pause for a moment in the poof while your body keeps going. Maybe some would call it a hole in the otherwise perfect snow, a curve in the landscape that is now so buried in snow it matches the rest of the terrain. The blanket is so thick it has changed the topography of the landscape. What had rollers only days ago, is now a blank slate.
And so you poof.That magical feeling of getting pitted into snow so deep that it sits in your lap, or hits you in the chest or wraps itself around your neck and over your head. A luxurious reminder that snow is just a variable form of water and moves in pretty much the same way when there is enough of it. Which we of course don’t see too often around here. I mean, three interrupted days of a snowstorm without any other “weather events” in between? Almost two feet of snow in three days— midweek? It was almost too good to be true … which is why it had to rain on Friday. Which meant we had three days to ski as much dream powder as possible. Three days to do all the things, to ski all the trails and to spend as many hours searching for the white room as possible.
It’s exhausting, these powder days with poof moments. We’re more used to a few inches of dust on a nice firm crust rather than this fluffy, deep snow. It was like the K-Cloud got stuck overhead and forgot what it was doing for a moment. Not that I’m complaining for an instant, but man, was this past week a variation of Mad River Glen’s motto. It wasn’t skiing if you can, but when you can. And oh man, did we ever. From bell to bell with granola bars in our pockets, we skied as much as we possibly could and were amazed to find fresh, untracked snow on each and every single run. We had to move fast. Not because there were people taking all the powder, but that Mother Nature would be. If we didn’t ski it now, the quarter-inch of expected rain would ruin everything.
It’s funny, you know. They say we only dream of those big, fluffy powder days but I dream about the frozen ungroomed snow, too. Maybe they are more like nightmares where your entire body is vibrating instead of floating, but that variability is part of who we are. You have to ski the hideous in order to understand the sweetness of the float. You have to go down the darkest of tunnels to see the light at the end of it. Otherwise, how do we know how far we have come or how far we still have left to go?
Skiing is life, we know this. And every day, every condition, every run, every turn teaches us new things about ourselves and the world. What happens when we’re floating along through life, having the most wonderful time, we sink up to our waist and get pitted? Shouldn’t that be a beautiful, poof moment of glory rather than a dark time of sadness and frustration?
