Skiing Vaykay

I'm in Lake Placid, NY right now, for a winter sports-type vacation. This is one of my favorite places on earth, so just being here makes me happy.

One centerpiece of a Lake Placid visit is skiing at Whiteface Mountain. As a ski area, Whiteface is a very mixed bag. Conditions are very unpredictable and there's always a search (shopping, as one gondola-mate called it) for a trail with good snow or even the paces within a given trail with good snow. On the other hand, it's friendly and unslick. I like it there.

Today is the first day of a holiday weekend. It's nice out today and it's supposed to be dreadfully cold tomorrow, so Whiteface is overrun. I managed to get myself up the mountain on the gondola (whose relationship to the traditional Italian gondolas is mysterious to me) and then decided that I would try to stay on the upper part of the mountain for as long a possible.

This requires skiing halfway down from the top and then taking another lift back up. The first time I did this, I went to the summit, Big Whiteface as it's called. I had heard talk that a trail called Upper Cloudspin, a wide, steep expert slope, had very good snow. This happens on that particular slope for a few days each season. The rest of the time the snow all blows off and you're left with a sheet of, if not glare ice, tightly packed ice crystals.

So I'm on the lift thinking about whether or not to take this slope, which I've taken maybe 3 times before over the course of 10 years, and I began weighing the pros and cons. It occurred to me that when I usually do this, part of the process is "Well, what's the worst that can happen?" However, the answer to this is seldom "gruesome injury up to and including painful death," as it was in this case, so I decided to pass.

I still couldn't resist the opportunity to look over the side as I slid past, but in not watching where I was going, I caught a ski on a hose leading to a snowmaker and lost my balance. I started skiing over the top of a guy's skis, which is a major faux pas in these circles, and to keep myself from continuing, off balance, down the slope I was trying to avoid I elected to fall over. I know, it's rare when falling over is the preferred alternative but this was one of those case. The guy who I skied over fell down too. I apologized profusely, to which he only responded, "That probably means you shouldn't be skiing this slope." I replied, "No kidding" and slid away.

The rest of the day was uneventful, though it made it clear to me that I need a lesson or two next time I ski, because I've lost some of my edge, so to speak, after skiing very little the past 2 years. After returning to the hotel room we went to one of my favorite things, The Lake Placid Toboggan Chute and did a couple of runs there. Even though we could have then gone snow tubing, I decided not to go for the sliding-down-frozen-things trifecta, at least for today.