OCTOBER 05: Intro
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I attended a ski industry conference earlier this year featuring a keynote speaker named Glen Hiemstra. Hiemstra earns his living as a “futurist,” predicting where certain industries are headed. He gave an interesting appraisal of our sport and made some compelling arguments about challenges we face: The U.S. population is getting older, fatter, lazier, more urban, and-because of global warming-may be running out of snow to ski on. In short, he painted a pretty grim picture for the future of skiing. Nevertheless, he did manage to soften the blow near the end of his speech by presenting what he felt was a logical solution to the problem: snow domes. Snow domes.
“If you can’t bring the people to the mountains,” Hiemstra says, “you can bring the mountains to them.”
Maybe he’s right. Maybe skiing needs to take place on man-made snow beneath man-made lights over a man-made slope in order to save the industry. But I doubt it. In the words (more or less) of the late Hunter S. Thompson: “Don’t confuse the sport of skiing with the industry of skiing.” Whether or not it’s being filmed, photographed, written about, marketed, or measured, what makes skiing such a great sport is that no matter what takes place while you’re doing it, at the very least you have managed to spend the day outdoors. And that, all by itself, is worth the effort. So if you have any friends planning a lifetime of indoor skiing, here are a few things I believe they will miss:
They will miss the opportunity to get lost, to pass through a gate and feel their stomach flutter as curiosity battles fear. They’ll miss the joy of skiing between the trees, when the words pine and aspen and cedar and spruce become more than just names of streets or condo complexes. They will miss the convex shape of a steep slope, where the fall line curves down and away like a basketball, leaving nothing to guide them but their heartbeat and a horizon. They will miss the nuance of spring, when the ability to hike quickly may be all that separates a good run from a great one. They will miss whiteouts, when even the most familiar terrain becomes new again. They’ll miss the smell of woodsmoke curling up from the valley in January. And the scent of an emerging forest in March. They will miss the odd juxtaposition of a winter morning, when the thunder of an avalanche bomb echoes through the silence of falling snow. They will miss the sanctity of a powder day, when every run feels like a good dream re-lived, satisfaction manifested, heaven under a pair of fat boards.
Indoor domes might be a substitute for bowling or lawn darts. They are not a substitute for skiing. Nothing is.
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