Horde

With no returns I didn’t expect it, but I was third position on blues. Guess that’s marked somewhere as my default position. Jim was in charge of Carvers today. Alicia was working on Cats, meaning all of the regular supervisors weren’t there. I volunteered to do check-in until the first two blue groups left, so I knew by the number of customers that I’d have work.

Even I didn’t expect how much there would be. When I had seven or eight, I relayed the message to Jim that I needed another instructor. He tried to merge the yellow group somewhere and bring that instructor up but was out of instructors and had to call people in I suppose. I started writing kids on my sheet and gave up when I had almost a dozen kids and just focused on keeping them in the same general area. I started waving my hands and calling, “11 now Jim, HELP!” By the time Jeronimo was finally located and got up to join me with a new hill sheet, I had “15 now!” I didn’t have enough fingers to express that large a number.

A couple of those little kids I’d already recognized and bumped down to Green straightaway so they’d be someone else’s problem, which is why I didn’t have 17. They were yellows or reds yesterday (for a reminder, red is first-time-on-snow and yellow is one-day-olds or slightly retarded first-week students) so there’s no way they should have been blue. Some proud parents must have horribly unrealistic expectations of their kids. I dumped another couple at the shuttle stop when I understood how long they’d been skiing and at what level, and got one named Madeline (“Maddie”) bumped up from Jonathan’s green class. She was really double-blue but placed herself in green. When Jeronimo and I herded them all up the hill, we had 14 children between us and about half of them had poles.

I sorted out the kids into sibling and friend groups when I got them, but Jeronimo claimed a group of three as his returns and said they were very good so we decided he’d take the higher blue group. He can be frustrating sometimes, and wanted to go up before going through the proper shuttle check procedure (which I needed to throw off the obvious greens.) We did a ski-off, and at the end of the day Jo rebuked us about it. She hates when people do that; it puts a lot of unfair pressure on the students. I skied down a slope in a demo of slow medium-radius parallel turns and we had each kid ski to me one by one. I divided them into two groups by skill and kept most of the friends together, but accidentally split up one pair of young boys. The one I got complained because eventually he was the only boy in my class, so I found Jeff with a blue class when we took a snack break, and moved him to there.

Jeronimo wanted one girl that skied parallel but I thought her balance was too far back, and he offered to trade me Madeline for her and her friend. I think that was just so that his whole group would have poles, but it was a good deal for me. Maddie was a sweet and enthusiastic girl, and always volunteered to bring up the rear so she could help others. After the ski-off we had seven each, and only one of mine was skiing in a wedge with legs over a meter apart. I moved him to a green group at the shuttle stop when we got down although it meant separating him from his sister and cousin.

After our snack break I had five girls, quite an accomplishment after the hectic morning when I expected to split 21 kids between 3 hastily-recruited instructors. I think that made me the smallest blue group. I asked Jeronimo if he wanted to give me back his weakest but he said he was happy with all seven. I just noticed we don’t have assigned “leads” for the level zones anymore, so the instructors do all the sorting on their own.

One little girl I had was Juliana, whose boots had her name on them in my handwriting. She’s a local who comes up on weekends, and at the start of the season I’d labeled her gear for her. I went ahead and marked her as a return on my time sheet. She was brave, enthusiastic, and impetuous, and she was smart too: she’d been in the blue level for so long that she knew all the requirements by heart. She could do them too but only when she was concentrating... otherwise she skied in wedge Christie. Her parents were well aware of this issue. Juliana rightly protested that we teach them so rigorously to do a wedge and then demand that they ski full parallel and never do it again. She’d been taught to “hold a big cookie” between her ski tips in the wedge, so it helped a lot when I told her to hold that same cookie between her ankles now. She was the first to jump down my little “courage chute” on Red Pine Road but she did it in a braking wedge.

Allisa was also pretty enthusiastic but she was dead-center on skills in the group, so I didn’t really pay her too much attention. Her turns were only missing a little edge work and some practice to keep them parallel all the time: there weren’t major flaws I noticed. She was reserved with me, but seemed to be having a good time with the other girls skiing. She was also frequently willing to try a challenge.

The two related to the weakest boy were my weakest remaining, but they paid attention to my teaching instructions (if not my requests to stay put) and with a little training they got good wedge Christies and almost a few full parallel turns. They could handle all the terrain I wanted and I had fairly few falls today. One of those two, Sydney, warned me that she was impatient so towards the end of the day I made her ski in the back for a run until she learned patience, and that worked astonishingly well. The other was Ellie, the little boy’s sister, and she was the slightly weaker of the two and the only one who was too fearful to ski down the chute on Red Pine Road despite peer pressure. After the others had gone down it and shouted that they wanted to climb up to do it again, she decided she could do it, but by then she’d already gone around to get down and didn’t want to climb up. Only Sydney, Madeline, and I climbed up for a second slide down.

Towards the end of the day I saw a few kids around the mountain skiing with their parents, including Sierra my girl from yesterday. I meant to ski down with Cole but got held up helping customers, and he didn’t wait that long. My goggles were completely fogged up when I went out, and Silverado Bowl held a thick foggy cloud so if I thought I had poor visibility before, today I skied it blind. I only guessed where the bumps were after I felt them under my skis. At least the cloud ended just above the bottom of the bowl, so I found the trail back easily enough. I sharpened and waxed my skis again and someone remarked that I work on my skis more than anyone. We didn’t have snowfall in the morning but we got wet heavy snow in the afternoon so a few people felt it was time for a new coat of wax.

Tonight Liz and Lupe (the Peruvian lifties) were over to watch a movie and Josh invited me to join. We watched “King of New York”: a violent old gangster movie from just before Giuliani was mayor there. It was supposed to be some kind of “Robin Hood” story wherein everyone ends up getting shot.