Waiting for Snow

Well! We are still waiting for snow up at our local mountain - the Mt Baker Ski area.  Season passes were purchased weeks ago, equipment checked, boots fitted, everything tried on by the kids to see if it still fits.

This is the time that drives skiers and snowboarders crazy, when your favorite mountain is opening later than anticipated.  The diehards have read and reread the ski and snow boarding magazines for months. The ski area hosted its annual video festival, Warren Miller ski movies were shown for the 395 time as mature adults yelled, screamed, catcalled, or chanted woo woo woo over skiing movie stars as they fling themselves head first, backwards, head over heels from cliff faces in Alaska, Iceland, Banff Island or Whistler-Blackcomb.

Favorite trails,  Al's in Taos, KT22 at Squaw Valley, The Nose at Stowe, Corbett's Couloir in Jackson Hole, the back country at Baker, or any steep line up at Bugaboo Lodge, have all been run and rerun in our dreams, at work, during sermons at church and in eighth grade algebra classes around the country, always beneath an azure blue sky.

Parents and kids alike have run thousands of slalom gates over the summer on their bikes, in kayaks, walking through crowds, running down hills, or around furniture while running the vacuum.

If you are on the golf course and see someone walking down a steep hill and they are moving left then right and back left again - yeah maybe they are trying to keep from slipping - but if they are a skier or boarder, nah they're making turns up in 7th Heaven or in a favorite back bowl at Vail.  

Watch someone on a trampoline, if suddenly they start hopping from one side to another instead of up and down - they are in the bumps on Exhibition at Sun Valley or dropping under the Thunder Lift at Teton Village.  They are in the zone.........

Watch your co-workers, watch someone in a crowd, watch someone parked in traffic on the freeway.  If they start tapping their finger or tapping their foot in any sense of rhythm, up down, left right, to and fro, hither and yon, rest assured they are not sitting on I5 or at the opera or in their tiny little cubicle. 

They are in the mountains.  

They are skiing..............