December 22, 2011
My favorite place to ski? All of 'em
by Tony Chamberlain/
Wherever the winter sun hits good snow, as it did here on a Sugarloaf morning, that’s my favorite place to ski. (photo: Tony Chamberlain/New England Ski Journal)
Over the 35 years or so that I have been a ski journalist, no question has been asked more frequently than where is my favorite place to ski. The best mountain. The best trails or runs. What is my numero uno?
When the question comes up during radio and television interviews, I realize there’s no walking back from a definitive answer. Name a place as your fave — say Tote Road at Sugarloaf or Mongolia Bowl at Vail, or Ptarmigan Chutes at Lake Louise — and you’ve put your chips down on a number. It’s yours. You own it. In fact, you’re confined to it.
So I usually take the mealy-mouthed politician’s way out and say something like, “Well, it depends on the kind of skiing I’m doing and whom I’m with or what kind of experience I’m looking for, blah, blah, blah.” Meaningless.
But in a way, as unsatisfying as that answer always sounds (and feels on the way out of my head), of course, it’s the right answer. Last month, I was perusing some of the magazines that purport to come up with lists proclaiming to be “Best Ski Areas in America.” These usually get broken down into best in the East, Rockies, Pacific and so forth.
I always treat such surveys or reviews with a certain degree of mistrust. They strike me as not necessarily the best places to go skiing or boarding, but the places that get the most traffic over the year, and thus have the most people voting for them. This is quite a different question from what is best, second best, etc.
So when I examine this question in the privacy of my own mind, I realize that my interview answers are not simply convenient but rather reflect the real span of a skiers’ life on the slopes. I’m thinking about the prattle of children in the back seat of my car as we’re driving home from Stowe sometime back in the ’80s. Their voices kept rising and tumbling over one another as they said such things as,
“Yuh, well did you see me on Goat? Those bumps were humungous!”
This was in a time when a black-diamond designation meant the most challenging runs at a particular ski area. Kids stalked them like treasures. And then, in just a matter of a few years, it seems, areas were putting up double-diamond signs and even a triple diamond here and there. Of course, kids sought out the toughest runs offered, skied them until some form of mastery was achieved, then crowed about it all the way home.
This is sort of the beginning of the arc of a skier’s life. Kids constantly challenge themselves and become bored to tears when a run they’re on serves them up a stretch of blue trail or, more ghastly yet, a green road or runout.
I well remember a near-tantrum from my otherwise amiable son when he got caught with Mom and Dad on Green Cabin Trail, an interminable flat connector road on Snowmass Colorado. It was not thrilling skiing, to be sure, but I realized how tainted young skiers feel when they believe their awesome powers are being wasted on dreaded “beginner” terrain. It may even be a kryptonite sort of thing.
As a first-year skier, I never quite went through those stages, largely because I started the sport with the annual Thayer Academy (high school) ski trip my sophomore year. Learning as much as I could in those harder-to-learn days, I could never advance on my friends who started skiing as kids, who remain better than me to this day despite the fact that in later years I’ve skied much more than they have.
So what does all this have to do with one’s favorite place to ski? Basically, that’s the wrong question. In the November issue of New England Ski Journal, you read David Shribman’s terrific remembrance of his early days skiing with his family in New Hampshire’s Mount Washington Valley. He was skiing one of those highly buffed out Rocky Mountain runs, acknowledged the area’s inimitable grandeur, but set off in a memory of the slopes of Black Mountain and Cranmore he remembered skiing as a child. There was throughout the piece the same nostalgic tone we find in “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” and a conclusion that where you grew up in skiing, especially with the family of your youth, that will always be your favorite place.
So, for me, it may be the time as a young dad when I watched my kid ski Sugarloaf’s Narrow Gauge top to bottom, or it may be when our family, bundled under a thick rough blanket peered out from our horse-drawn sleigh at that Lake Louise glacier glimmering in the distant moonlight. Or maybe that Jay Peak (George Sarovatka) downhill race where two boys I brought up clocked over 60 to win medals.
These days, it’s any crisp blue cruiser winding through sunny winter air.
In the end, especially after the burnishing of memory, if the snow is good (groomed, powder, hard-packed, slush bumps or spring corn), skiing is always good, always magical … and I hope no one ever asks me that question again.
This article originally appeared in the December 2011 issue of New England Ski Journal.
Tony Chamberlain is the editor of New England Ski Journal. He can be reached at editor@skijournal.com
