Christmas Eve

I was at work twenty minutes early this morning and I got asked to help with check-in. They thought I’d had enough work for a while, and I was not assigned to teach today at all even though at least two of my kids returned. My schedule says I’m on “CV S.” tomorrow, and nobody but Tameca knew that means “shuttle”: I’ll be ferrying kids up the gondola from the base shuttle stop. I manned the check-in desk outside and put on my useless glove liners when my hands froze up; I can't use the little pencils in my big gloves. It was cold in the morning but very sunny today and it warmed up soon. It’s what instructors here call a “bluebird day.” Maira decided she was a double-blue today, and I thought that was reasonable so I checked her in as such. Most parents had a decent idea of what levels their kids should be, but one overestimated by two levels. I know a lot of people hate service-sector jobs because customers are awful, but I thought the parents and kids who came to check in were fairly reasonable and patient with the process. Some of them were more familiar with it than me.

Check-in only took a little over half an hour and Tameca was about to let me go but decided to keep me as a backup instructor. I did “instructor assistance” for the morning to help out and earn a few bucks. She had me fill a cooler with water from the Lodge’s kitchen. Being in there made me hungry. Carrying the heavy water container, I slipped on the floor there and could have broken my spine - but I caught myself. I took the water over to the shuttle stop, and helped out the instructors there. I also brought them a few other things they asked for and covered for the guy managing it for a few minutes so he could go to the bathroom. Later I helped one of the instructor assistants move a fence there, move gates in the learning area, and plant a “parents keep out” sign. I assisted for about two hours today until Tameca said she didn’t need me anymore and I should go. Of course whenever I saw clients I tried to help them as well… I looked after and took the snowboard boots off a loudly crying, annoying little kid and gave him a pair of boot warmers I’d just put in my jacket for such an occasion. I took Alexis to the shuttle stop to join her new group. When I stopped by later on I discovered she’d had some sort of accident at the top of the lift and they called up her mother, who was still ill today. Alexis’s grandmother told me she was “coughing up a lung.” I also switched a kid who was unhappy with his first attempt at snowboarding over to a ski class, and ran out to find the instructor for his class and tell him to expect the new kid.

Having been released at 11:00, I changed into my own coat and skied around to explore the mountain. The Tombstone and Peak 5 chairlifts were open and I skied there first, but the Dreamscape chairlift only opened in the afternoon so I didn’t get that far south. The snow there was chunky and not soft, and many of the trails were icy, so I did not want to go back. Around noon I headed back to get things I forgot in my teaching coat, like my sunscreen and my sandwich. I had a feeling this morning I should make one before the prosciutto went bad. It's a good thing I did.

I bumped into Charley and her father at the Red Pine Lodge after eating my sandwich. He said that Charley was zooming down Snowdancer with no problem but Jesse “has some confidence issues” and is scared to do it. I tried to give him some tips to keep her calm. I also saw Alexis’s mother on the way in to collect her daughter. She vaguely told me what happened when I explained I was off duty and wasn’t with her today. Neither Tameca or Alexis had admitted that anything was wrong when I saw them.

I took Short Cut lift up and went over to Super Condor Express, the chairlift that services the northernmost peak. It’s mostly double black diamond runs off there. Those double-blacks are really double blacks. I get down them all right but don’t look very good doing it. It's huge wild-grown moguls, deep chopped-up powder, and shrubbery sticking out in many places. All my mistakes come to light in such challenging terrain. I skied five or so different runs off that chairlift until I got tired, and then took the advice of the Bad Idea Bears and tried to get back to Sun Peak chairlift by seeking untouched snow off some of the south slopes, which had bushes everywhere. I did a couple of full heel-over-head somersaults in the powder when I got my skis stuck in the snow or tripped over a bush, and I landed on my head a couple times. The south side of that ridge has a lot of exposed little bushes to hit, and the snow is over knee-deep fluffy powder but there’s no base: I felt the bottom a few times while skiing, dirt and even a bit of rock. My skis survived it relatively well. I’m sorry I didn’t bring a camera today because it was such good visibility.

I headed down a little after 3:00 but missed the 3:30 bus and had to wait for the 4:00. There was room for everyone to sit on this one, which is lucky for peak season. I guess a lot of people decided to go home early for Christmas Eve. There weren’t many lessons in any case. I played some Bioshock because the TV was available. Vanessa wanted to have a big Christmas dinner together (she said it was Scott’s suggestion) but what happened was we all just cooked ourselves dinners at about the same time, except for Craig who had some sort of dinner date with his boss. I brought down my Scotch whisky to share. There are only a couple of shots left in there now.