The cost of the descent

Lots of things are more important than skiing, and many of them come with price tags that have similarly ballooned over the past few years.

But sheesh: If I had walked up to the window and bought conventional lift tickets for the six days that I have skied so far this season, they would tote up to almost $1,000 — a price that, for someone who remains irate that Jackson Hole jacked its ticket cost past $35 somewhere around 1993 (the current price is north of $200), is enough to knock the wind out of you. Time is funny that way.

The cost of skiing and the industry’s business model have been overhauled in recent years, primarily by the rise of multimountain season passes (Ikon and Epic are the best sellers) that grant multi-day or even unlimited access to resorts across the country and overseas. There’s a certain aspirational element to these passes: You’re not just buying access to a hill in your region, but — as with a lottery ticket — purchasing the possibility that, if things break right, you might find yourself banging the slopes of the Dolomites or the Matterhorn before the thaw. (Considering the soggy, miserable Capital Region weather of the past few weeks, I’d settle for a semi-decent day at Windham in the Catskills, where Friday’s high temperature was in the 40s.)

But although their amortized cost is decent, these multi-mountain passes are in no way cheap; I can’t imagine covering the price for a family of four. Not to mention the added costs of getting to the hill, lodging relatively nearby, meals and gear. Plus the hassles of hauling that equipment, waiting on lift lines, occasionally being cold and frequently dealing with the fear that you’ve made a very bad terrain choice and are about to suffer grievous injury up to and including death.

And yet there I was on New Year’s Day arriving in Salt Lake City, where just to the east the mountains and canyons of the Wasatch Range were being pummeled by the sort of snowfall that keeps transportation officials and avalanche specialists up all night. As I write this, the Deseret News has reported that 2023 has already been the fifth-best water year since they started keeping records on such matters — which is fantastic news for skiers as well as for people in several western regions of this nation who find that water comes in handy.

Alta, the resort at the top of long, narrow, avalanche-prone Cottonwood Canyon where we stayed for four days, has reported receiving 370 inches of snow so far this season, which works out to roughly the height of a threestory house. The snowfall during my week in the Wasatch was sufficient to shut down the winding canyon road numerous times, and prompt the declaration of what’s known as “interlodge”: a status that legally bars hotel

guests from walking outside — not to the parking lot, not to the hot tub — for fear of either interfering in avalanche remediation efforts or getting buried in a sudden river of snow.

There is a side-status to interlodge in which people are allowed to leave the building and the ski resort is running but the access highway remains closed down, which means that the newly dumped-on slopes are available for the exclusive use of the few hundred people already at the top of the canyon. This condition is known colloquially as “country club,” and I want to go there when I die.

Death, as might be obvious from the two references in the first few paragraphs of this column, was on my mind during this ski trip. It was my first since the passing last spring of my father, a king-hell skier into his late 70s who introduced me to the sport a half-century ago at Holiday Valley, an hour outside Buffalo. I can’t think of a single thing that he didn’t like about skiing, from a sunny-day al fresco lunch of summer sausage and cheese on the hill to easing off your boots in an apres-ski bar, which in my memories was always blue with cigarette smoke. Most of all, he loved the camaraderie of it — talking on the lift, stopping midway down the hill to admire someone else’s line.

On one side of the ledger we can pile up the dollars and effort, and on the other we put the fact that no one ever said on their deathbed that they went skiing too much. (Unless, perhaps, their demise was the result of sailing off a cliff.)

Last Saturday, the first fully sunny day of the trip, I stood with my friend Ken on the lip of Mineral Basin on the back side of Snowbird, just down the canyon from Alta. This section hadn’t opened since a massive dump that had lasted Thursday night into Friday, and the tracks in the slope below still looked like a minimalist canvas of dark sine waves on white.

Because I am older now, the descent went like this: a halfdozen turns in the ungodly soft powder, then stop to rest, look up the slope for any errant skiers hurtling at me and then down to fall line to pick the next route; repeat. My shoulders and quads were screaming. My lungs burned in the thin alpine air.

It felt great. And it’s a memory that already brings pleasure, banked up for the gray days.