Blackcomb

The Boy wanted to go skiing, so Jack decided to take him to Whistler this weekend. Claire-Adele and I decided we didn't want to be left behind, so we joined their boys' weekend. When Claire-Adele was ten, she and I went to London for a week. It was a beautiful mother-daughter trip, and I should have let Jack and the Boy have this to themselves. But I didn't. When Claire-Adele goes to college in a year and a half, Jack and the Boy will have three years for father-son bonding. I don't feel so bad now. Besides, they ski a lot together during the winter.

Friday night, we crossed the border into Canada at Lynden with four pairs of skis on the roof. I was going to give it a go. We had a long, slow drive from Seattle to Whistler, arriving at 10:30 or so. My kids were so cranky and fussy you would have thought they were toddlers. Or teenagers.

The Boy was awake at 7:00. He is on a club soccer team, and skiing is his second sport. This past year, he has skied thirty days and counting. One of Jack's friends said you need thirty days in a season to dramatically improve. To contrast, I've skied four days so far this season. I've asked the Boy if he wants to join a ski team, but he says no. He prefers free-skiing and jumping in the terrain parks instead of racing, although he is pretty fast. Think of a football running back or any soccer player versus a track star. Speed is a key element for running backs and soccer players, but they do more stuff. The Boy likes the stuff. He can be grumpy and sour in the damp and dreary Seattle winter, and then a day of skiing lifts his mood.

He heard Jack and I talking and popped into our bedroom with a giant smile on his face, apparently having forgotten the snottiness between him and his sister last night. The lifts didn't open until 10, so we had three hours to kill before we left. The Boy was happy to run into the Village to get breakfast with his dad. In a normal world, the Boy would be in bed on the weekend and wouldn't talk until fed. Now he was chipper.

After we ate breakfast and got to the gondola, I was walking around looking a little lost when one of the Whistler guides approached me.

"Which green runs are open?" I asked.

The woman was shy of seventy years old and probably been skiing for sixty-five of her years.

"There aren't any beginner runs open," she said. "It's just the top of Blackcomb. Are you a beginner?" she asked, looking alarmed. Later I thought I should have told her I was a re-beginner, someone used to be decent and then needed to start over. Only the diehards come out for spring skiing after Whistler  Mountain is closed for the season. When we have skied here before, we shave spent most of our time on Whistler, riding the Peak-to-Peak to check out a few runs on Blackcomb and to admire the epic view.

I told her I am recovering from an ACL surgery and I've skied a few times already, but I needed to warm up. She looked relieved and told me where to go.

"There is a steep section at the top of the Excelerator Express lift, and then you take the Jersey Cream Express to the Expressway, and Easy Out runs," she said. "You can take Catskinner Chair back up and warm up on those. After that, Seventh Heaven is supposed to be good today. Lots of easy and wide blue runs," she said.

"Thanks, I said. "I've skied Seventh Heaven before I tore my ACL," I said. I have. Those are great runs, probably my favorites. That was back when I could ski all day for three or four days. I am not waxing nostalgic about my youth when I could do anything. It isn't fair to compare my current state to when I was twenty-three. I could ski for days back when I was in my mid-forties instead of my late forties.

"Good luck!" she said. I would need it.

Here I wish I had a brain-to-blog app to track all my thoughts as I went down the runs. I'll try to re-create the highlights here.

When I got to the top of the Execelator Express lift, I had to take a steep little hill down to the Jersey Cream Express lift. The kind Whistler Ambassador warned me about this. Everyone getting off the gondola was heading down this run. The steepness alone wasn't the issue. In addition to being crowded, the snow was concrete. I couldn't stick my pole into the snow it was that hard. This is a hazard of spring skiing. The snow melts in the afternoon and can be wonderfully soft, but then overnight temps dip below freezing and the next morning you have concrete.

I stood at the top of the lip and looked down. There was no way I could carve on this. I thought about downloading back down on the chairlift I just came up and then taking the gondola to the base. Jack paid for four lift tickets, but the exchange rate is 73 American cents for a Canadian dollar. In effect, my ski ticket is free and if we pretend we paid American dollars for Canadian lift tickets.

I decided to give it a shot. I watched other people ski to see if anyone found soft snow. I saw softer snow to the far right of the run. I moved to the left and skied across the width of the run so I wouldn't have to turn much.

A run that should have taken a minute took me ten. Then I wondered how I was going to get back down the mountain. What if there weren't any open green runs back to the gondola? What if they didn't download on the chairlifts?

I got to the top and skied down Easy One. This is a family, beginner area. It, too, was concrete. My kids had gone ahead and already did a run in the time to took me to get to the top of the lift. Jack texted them, and they met us mid-run, and then skied off.

The last time I was at Whistler, I thought the Easy One run was the easiest, most boring run in the world. I understood why people wanted to ski more challenging stuff. Now, my legs were tired by the end of the run. There was one part where Jack told me I had to get my momentum up to make it up a small hill. I managed to do that, and that was the fastest I skied all day. My right leg was more tired than my left which was wearing the brace. I wondered if I should get a brace for my right leg, too. While the steepness wasn't any worse than what I had been skiing earlier this winter at Snoqualmie, the difference was the length of the run. This run was ten times longer--maybe more--than Little Thunder. I was tired, both mentally and physically. I had to concentrate the entire time. There wasn't free space in my brain where I could relax and be in the zone. My brain didn't trust my body to take the runs without intervention.

I took a break for an hour at the Rendezvous Cafe while Jack and the kids skied some more. At lunch, the Boy was dejected when I asked how it was.

"The terrain park had two parts," he said. "One was too easy and the other one I would have killed myself." I had seen the jumps in terrain park on the Catskinner lift. I saw people getting air for several seconds while they did backflips. It looked cool, but it also looked deadly if you didn't know what you were doing. I am glad the Boy didn't try them. "If you make a mistake waterskiing, you splash," said the Boy. "If you crash on these jumps, you will crack."

After lunch, I decided to ski back down while Jack and the kids skied the glaciers at the top of the mountain. It had snowed about two inches while I was taking a break. When I got back out, the skiing was remarkably better.  I took the Easy Way Down, which is a road run which felt about three miles long. My Toyota RAV4 could have done this run, no problem. The challenge with this run was the narrowness and the tiny signs orange signs the size of my glove along the boundary that said

WARNING. Out of Bounds Area. Not Patrolled.

with a drop off on the left side of the run. (I don't know exactly how small the signs were--I didn't want to get that close to the edge to see.)

Great, I thought. If I fall off the edge here, no one will ever find me. There probably isn't even a cell signal out here. A bear would probably find my remains in the spring. This horrible inner-dialogue haunted me on the way down. Once I got out of the road run section and back into the regular part, the fog came in. It was more like a cloud where you can't see anything. Finally, I got to Solar Coaster, which was going up, and Wizard Express, which was going down. My plan was to take a green run back to the top of the gondola and ride back down, but I couldn't see the run that would take me there.

Fuck it, I thought. We are skiing again tomorrow. I'll download to the bottom and walk back to the car.

I took a picture at the bottom at the end of the day. I didn't want to press my luck by taking a picture at the top. There is a mountain in the background, but it is covered in fog. Trust me.

As I was walking back to the car, I crossed a footbridge over a creek. I stopped to look at the water that was melting off the mountain. A majority of the water in the creek had once been snow. This water had been on a transformative journey. It melted and was filtered and then picked up minerals as it ran through the rocks in the mountain.

I remember what my dad said a year and four months ago when I tore my ACL. "It's going to be all uphill from here, but when you get to the top, you'll be in really great shape."

Sixteen months ago, I couldn't walk, and now I am skiing again. Sixteen months ago, I was coming off the loss from the School Board election and was unemployed. Now I am in training for a new job that I'll start in August. As I stood at the bottom of the mountain looking at the creek, I thought about what my dad said and all of my uphill climbing last year.

I made it to the top of the hill. And I am in great shape.