fall line

i've been gone a long time, and i'd forgotten how much i love ricker mountain.

i tanked on a whole season last year, and i didn't even get to go get my picture taken for my pass.

i worried that i'd forget how to ski, but after a few turns i was swinging smoothly back and forth across the fall line, observing newton's laws.

it isn't too cold and the snow is good and soft which is a bonus beause it's early season and there's never enough open and it gets skiied off too early in the day.

and they even have the number one chair open (the wilderness chair to those who must use trail maps), which is some kind of honkin' miracle because there's no snowmaking up there and you never know what you're going to get.

there's a trail up there called peggy dow's. not peggy dow's this or peggy dow's anything, just "peggy dow's". i've never been able to find anyone who can tell me who peggy dow was. when you're standing there in the late day light there's nothing that can touch you and gravity is your friend, if you can pick your spots.

but get this: there's this woman i know from mountain bike racing and i don't have her phone number or her email address because by the time i realized i really needed to talk to her, it was late in the season and she skipped the last few weeks.

and lately i've REALLY wanted to talk to her.

and i get on the chairlift with this kid and he's friendlier than most and he asks me if i've gotten a lot of runs in and i tell him it's my second run of the season and somehow it comes up that i didn't ski at all last year because of my knees and then we're talking about mountain biking and he gets to the point where he says "do you know my mom?"

KNOW HER? i want to talk to her. can you write this down?

so. sometimes you're in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, which is why, kind of, i want to talk to this kid's mom anyway. it's kind of complicated.


but they don't have the new quad open yet, which means you can't go up to the top of the mountain, and they took out the old vista chair so now the mid-mountain just does that: it drops you off mid-mountain, only now there's no option from there to keep going up, which i find somewhat depressing.

they call that chair the vista chair because, i suppose, it's a treed-in summit and there is no view.

soon, but not soon enough i'll take the new quad up to (nearly) the top of ricker mountain and i'll walk the rest of the way to stand on the platform and look out over the valley and hey, you can almost see my house from here.

i've got to go; i have reading to do and morning will come up quickly.