A lot of social distortion in online skiing communities

Attitash took advantage of the frigid temperatures to make some snow. (Dan Houde, WiseguyCreative.com/MWV Chamber)

If you skied during the polar vortex that enveloped New England earlier this month, good for you. 

If you didn’t, good for you. Join the club. 

If you skied during the polar vortex just so you’d be able to post images of your brief bravery online, well that’s neat, I guess. But if you didn’t ski, yet took the opportunity of some resorts limiting lift access for customer and staff safety to blindly rail at them for doing so, then you’re part of the problem. 

“Ridiculous….we are raising a bunch of wimps that won’t be prepared for any sort of hardship in their future,” one Facebook user posted in response to Jay Peak Resort’s decision to close on Feb. 3, with record-low temperatures predicted for northern Vermont. “Call the wambulance.” 

There was more where that came from, but frankly, that was the best-written and most lucid among the complaints. 

Jay Peak president and general manager Steve Wright put it best, posting that the easiest way to find out who the hard-core people are is to shut down your lifts. Because then, they’ll tell you. 

Then they’ll tell you again.

I once envisioned social media to become a more integral part of skiing than relying on the limited snow phone. With that sort of power to communicate in our pockets, ski areas would no longer have the ability to fudge their conditions. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook were certainly going to create a landscape of transparency while users would discuss with each other whether the reported “loose granular” is promising or not. 

We do have that, but what skiing social media has more devolved into is, perhaps predictably, a customer service complaint line, where guests who happened to book their weekend at Stowe over two of the coldest days Vermont has ever experienced, can really let their superiority fly when the resort makes the call to shut down the lifts in sub-zero temperatures. In other words, “why isn’t your staff running the lifts so I can take my one run in order to tell Instagram I did it, all before I retire to the hot tub before my spa appointment at noon?” I mean, why wouldn’t you risk the well-being of your employees? 

Then there are the lift line photo obsessives who take every opportunity to post an image of just how unimaginably long the lift line is at a particular mountain, rarely taking into account the time of day, conditions, or weather. It’s usually, always, Vail, which serves as sort of the official social media dartboard. 

Everybody gets to be an expert online, no matter what their background in reality might be. So, it’s more than refreshing when a ski area fights back. That’s what happened on the morning of Jan. 23, when Wachusett Mountain delayed lifts due to de-icing. One “expert” on Twitter didn’t take kindly to the holdup. 

“Wachusetts [sic] mountain ski resort won’t let paying customers up the mountain due to “de icing” I call bull**** I want my money back or extended session time #wachusettsmountain @Wachusett @MountWachusett“ 

To which the good folks at Wachusett responded with a photo of the lift’s frozen grips, caked with foot-long icicles: “Here’s what the grips look like. We are working hard to get the lifts up and running and will happily extend your session time. Please see us at customer service.” 

On the one hand, you could say that the offended’s complaint went rectified, so why not use the social media platform in that regard? Then again, was the extra hour really worth the rightful, online berating he received from other Twitter users? And didn’t you spend it in the bar anyway? 

I guess it depends on the level of “hard-core” you choose to attain in order to decide if it’s all worth it. 

Here’s to the next cold snap when those brave souls can tell everybody else what they’re doing wrong. Somewhere out there, you might even have the chance to find out from someone else how the snow in the notch really is. 

That information is somewhere, buried beneath the 450th complaint about why you can’t buy an Epic Pass 30 days after the deadline or the cost of a cheeseburger at the lodge. 

Eric Wilbur can be reached at [email protected]. .