He Knew He Was Right

I took my latest trip to Stowe during President's week, meeting up with friend Mike and his family. I love it up there: the mountain, the restaurants, the pubs, the village—all of it. For the last decade, Stowe has been the centerpiece of my Prez week trip, but each year I try to visit at least one surrounding ski area too. This year I opted for Sugarloaf, in Maine, a mere 5 hours to the east on Route 2. Now, I have a certain fondness for the Loaf too, which I chronicled last year. When I was into cross-country skiing in the 90s, I found myself wandering farther and farther north to the better XC areas, and it was at the Sugarloaf XC ski center that I learned how to use skate skis. The impressive sight of that mountain, though, made me want to try alpine skiing again (and some XC struggles going downhill ended up forcing my hand). As a neophyte skier, Mike and I went there in 1999, but I hadn’t been back since. When I learned that a cousin would be living in Maine for a year, I...

We're in the second half of April, and I haven’t skied in nearly a month. Still, the Fan pages of some northeast resorts, most notably Sugarloaf, are posting reports of their spring conditions: 8 inches this past weekend?! That got me thinking back to some of my early ski posts here, and some of those first trips I took when I was just trying to get going on skis. In one entry, I alluded to a 1998 lesson at Stowe , and wrote that I would post about it at some point. When my buddy Greg and I went up there, well, it wasn’t pretty. Owing to inclement weather, the trip itself took a good 3-4 hours longer than usual. Roads were slippery, it was tough to see, and I think I even suggested pulling off the road when I suspected that we wouldn't reach our destination until well after midnight. But, we arrived later that evening, and made our way to the Spruce base for our lesson the next morning. The instructor for our group was Paco, who I think was the sheriff of a southern Vermont tow...