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Inauguration!

abc

Well-known member
Joined
Mar 2, 2008
Messages
5,894
Points
113
Location
Lower Hudson Valley
No, not the presidential inauguration. Just my inauguration of 20/21 (lift_served downhill) season!

I’ve been skiing since December. But not in downhill ski resorts. A bunch in nordic centers, and a couple back country when we had the pre-Christmas storm.

So today is the first day in resorts. I didn’t have to climb under my own steam to get any turns. The “Mount Snow Intel” thread gave me confidence that I would have fun there. And I did. I had fun.

Does it feel special or different? Not really. Still...

The skiing felt just like it always. Good snow, empty slopes, no lift line to speak of (at least not the ones I took). I only rode 2 lifts, Canyon and (ooops, what’s the name of the lift at North side?).

Mask was not an issue. I practically forgot it’s there.

But the lack of indoor space to warm up (never mind boot up)... Now that sucked a lot more than I realized!

It’s a particular issue for me (and that’s part of the reason I haven’t skied in resort so far). I had new boots last season. Although I‘ve skied on it for a bunch of days last season, I was still working out the last few bits of mods when all ski resorts suddenly closed in March! So today is the first day back in that boot. Those last bits of yet-to-fine-tuned mods were VERY noticeable. And not having a warm place to sit down to take my feet out of the boot AT ALL was really HARD!

More over I loath to walk miles and miles in my new boots, prematurely pack out the nice tight liner! :(

To make a long story short, it was a shorter day than I’d like, due entirely to the fact there’s no indoor resting space. Instead of going in for 5-10 minutes to warm my feet up, I had to ski all the way down to the bottom, walk to my car, wait for the heater to warm up the interior of the car.,. then wait for blood circulation came back to my feet, and did whatever minor adjustments on my boot. Fortunately, there’s practically no line at the Canyon lift, which I parked near. Otherwise, the feet-warming “trip” to the car could have been a whole lot worse.

With all the interruptions, I thought I would close the lift by skiing my day’s worth. But that didn’t happen. 30 minutes before lift closing, my feet was cold as ice due to some small blood constriction that I thought I could tough out, as I knew I didn’t have enough time to do the “back to the car to warm up” routine and come back out. But I couldn’t tough it out any more, or I thought it would be unwise to keep on skiing with my feet starting to lose feeling. So I straightlined to the bottom. I actually skied across the parking lot to my car because walking would have been too painful! (the fresh 1-2” at the end of day pretty much covered up any dirt at the parking lot so my skis bottom were undamaged)

It was a good day as far as skiing goes. But the Covid-related issues was a lot more troublesome than I anticipated.

In hindsight, I should have brought my old boots with me, and just save the new boots for next season when we (hopefully) will be back to “normal” operation. So I’ll have to make do for the next 2 weeks. (I’m up here in VT till sometime next week).
 
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