Day 207 total for this season with 195 being lift service, as of writing this May 19.  It feels good.  Hiking is now pretty easy (12 hiking days in, it should be). Though I don’t really want to do it when I start, I make it to the top quickly without really stopping, and my…

Two hundred days. That is how many days, as of this writing, that I have skied this year. Of those days, 192 were lift service, and eight were uphill on Superstar. Last year it took me until June 4 to get to 203 days. I am blowing by that mark and we aren’t even halfway…

Boot-hiking season is here! As some of you may or may not know, boot hiking season is one of my favorite times in Killington. When everyone else is getting out their lawn chairs and firing up the grill, I am sharpening my crampons, eager for the time when the lift will not be running, and…

As of the submission of this article, I have skied 186 days this year at Killington, already more than my previous very respectable year where I skied nearly every operating day (and we haven’t even hit May yet). They did a spectacular job of snowmaking this year, putting down the last of the pad in…

Remember those socks that sat all year in your high school gym locker? Calcified, petrified with sweat, they felt like sandpaper putting them on; they smelled like a kimchi factory staffed by gangrenous skunks. Had your mother known that they even existed, she would have slapped you, washed your mouth out with soap, and burned…

So now I have some thinking to do. As I mentioned before, the day after the cortisone shot I was pain free. In the week after I have been in more pain than I was before the shot. They say to give it a couple of weeks, that the cortisone crystallizes in the tissues where…

When I was a kid, I never woke up in the morning and said, “When I grow up, I want to have a needle in my spine.”  Of course I also never said, “When I grow up, I want to be single at the age of 46.” And also, I never said, “When I grow…

I have said a lot of mean things about my Guinea pig Pip (“The Impaler”).  To be fair, he has deserved most of it over the past year and a half since I rescued him. But also to be fair, the first year of his life was horrible, and he was basically feral when I…

So the SnowPlow comedy contest at the Outback was fun. I broke all my rules, went in with new material (I usually rehearse myself silly), and engaged in filthy blue comedy (I am usually a clean comic, but contests are always basically a parade of people discussing the personal details of masturbation. If I had…

I have been sitting here, pondering all of the ways life goes wrong. I have been thinking of all of the things that have happened to me, dozens of injuries, dozens of broken bones (ostensibly more than a dozen broken noses alone), love life that is ridiculous to the point of stupidity, loneliness, no retirement…

What a week of skiing, and what a terrible time to be out with a back injury! Fresh powder every day for a week! I would never, ever be the kind of guy who would ski injured. But to get first tracks in Growler, Devils Den, Pins, Low Rider, Outer Limits, Devil’s Fiddle, or the…

Well, campers, the skiing has been outrageously good. With a series of Nor-Inchers, we continue to get nearly nightly refreshers in the woods and on the trails, and the skiing is delightful. That is the good news. Here is the bad news: I am not able to take much advantage of it, because it turns…

I have have always wanted children.  This might seem counterintuitive, given my life of fairly wild irresponsibility, travel, and transience, but it is true. I have, however, been very careful to wait to have children until I found a proper host candidate for my offspring. I have been repeatedly  unsuccessful at choosing domestic partners, my…

“Communally Acquired Pneumonia.” While this sounds like the way a deity might punish hippies, what this really means is that it is a case of pneumonia that was not acquired in a hospital (aptly named “Hospital Acquired Pneumonia”). Ask me how I know. Remember that cold that settled down in my lungs for a long…

Things have been alright. My back has been alright, weightlifting has been alright, work has been alright, the skiing has been alright (we keep getting these little surprise powder days, nothing on Killington Road, but really nice turns up on the mountain). Things have been alright. Winter climbing league has started down at the climbing…