Me, Myself, And The Mountain

January 11th, 2008 at 07:28am Michael Conniff 2

You read the ski magazines and you walk around the Snowmass Mall and you can’t help but hear people talking about “First Chair.”

First Chair has a magical, almost mystical quality to people. The other day I heard a skier talking about how he wasn’t skiing much but had ben there for the First Chair the day before, as if that were enough to make up for his shortcomings.

First Chair, of course, means you are the first person on the lift, the first civilian up the mountain on any given day. That seemed like a great idea but it had never happened to me in my lifetime for all the usual reasons. But all that changed for me last weekend in Snowmass. The fates had conspired to get me to the mountain early, with time for coffee at Paradise before I put on my boots.

The Mall was a ghost town though there were signs of life. Instructors shouldering skis moved from Point A to Point B to get to the right place on time. Shopkeepers made the motions about opening up their shops. I put on my skis and skied down an empty slope to Fanny Hill and the sixpack at the bottom.

It was beautiful, the nothingness of it, and all the better because I didn’t give a spit whether I made it to First Chair or not. The lifts were running empty like they were willing to be filled up, and I was ready to do my part. Skiing, thank God, had never been a competition with me because I had never been good enough to compete with anyone besides me. The mountain was your competition if you need that, but that’s a story for another day.

This time I slid into the liftie corral with a group of snowboarders already in front of me. So it was going to be Second Chair, not First, but I could not have cared less. First Chair, Second, ten thousandth didn’t mean a thing to me until I got off at the top of Ajax Express.

Then, suddenly, I got it.

Because there was no one there. Just me, myself, and the mountain. I skied down to the Big Burn lift and they wouldn’t let me on because of high winds–First Chair was not to be for me on this day on Snowmass mountain. But that was okay. I skied the lower part of the mountain back down to the sixpack and it was miraculously empty, with just me and my soul brothers, a skier or two. It reminded me of the time a few years back when I was an instructor at Smuggler’s Notch in Vermont and we used to “sweep” the mountain for strays after the lifts closed–the spiritual opposite of First chair, but equally spiritual. At Smuggs, they paid you for doing the sweep but we should have paid them for a chance to meet God on the mountain.

At Snowmass, as the minutes ticked by, I was elated to see that no one was rushing onto the mountain for the first couple hours. You do First Chair and Second Chair and you get this gift of untracked powder or groomed runs with no one to run into. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, and maybe someday I’ll actually get on the First Chair and figure out what it all means.

Entry Filed under: Snowmass, Resorts, Pitkin County, Spirituality, Outdoors, People, Health, United Post, Colorado, The West