Ski trips are easier to remember when something odd happens

Rick Brockway

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February 3, 2012

Anonymous Daily Star The Daily Star Fri Feb 03, 2012, 02:24 AM EST

When you do something on a regular basis, you don't remember the average day's events in the days and weeks that follow. But when something happens out of the ordinary, it sticks in your mind for a long, long time.

As many of you know, I'm a skier. I have a season pass at Belleayre Mountain and ski at least one day every week. Yes, even with the lack of snow, I've been skiing. In fact, with the man-made snow and exceptional grooming, the skiing has been great.

But do I remember what happened two or three weeks ago or last year on those ordinary days? No, but I remember a few of the unusual things that happened.

Probably my most memorable skiing incident still lingers in my mind from better than 40 years ago. I was night skiing at Scotch Valley, riding the chair lift to mid-station. The upper part of the mountain wasn't lit, so everyone got off about two-thirds of the way up. As I pushed myself from the chair, my fingers slipped between the slats of the seat. All of a sudden, I was suspended by one hand and still being carried up into the darkness. I yelled and the attendant stopped the lift.

Chair lifts don't go backwards and I was hanging five or six feet above the ground. Several people came to help. With a couple of tall, strong fellows pushing up on my skis to get the weight off of my hand, I managed to pry my fingers loose. It was a little embarrassing at the moment, but I've laughed about it many times over the years.

I was reminded of that incident a couple of weeks ago when I heard a fellow yell as I got off the lift.

"I'm caught!" he said.

His jacket got stuck on the chair and he couldn't get off. As the chair went around the top to continue back down, he finally got loose and jumped off. Of course, he couldn't get back up with the chairs going by overhead, so the lift attendant stopped the quad and helped him up. We laughed about that for quite a while.

Another day, we were skiing down a black-diamond run (expert slope).

When I got to the bottom of the headwall and turned off on a trail to the left, my buddy wasn't behind me. I slowly worked my way back to the Wanatuska trail, where I found him yelling for someone to bring down his ski. After hitting a small patch of ice followed by a pile of heavy snow, he slipped and slid all the way to the bottom on his back. He ended up in the trees with just one ski and a couple of bruises on his hip. The only thing that really got hurt, though, was his pride.

We stopped part way down a trail called Horseshoe Pass last week. As we stood there, a fellow with bushy, gray hair and an equally wild beard came down the slope doing some fancy stuff. He made a couple of loops, brought one ski up behind his head like a ballerina and went by us backwards.

He was quite proud of his skiing ability until he went off the trail backwards and continued down a 15-foot embankment into the trees. He crashed down through some tall, thorny blackberry brambles, went over a log and toppled a small, dead beech tree before coming to a stop.

We went over to help, finding him on the ground just laughing. After dislodging himself from the tangle of brush, skis and poles, he crawled back to the top. We laughed all day over that one. He was lucky he only had a few scrapes and scratches because he wasn't wearing a helmet.

It's funny that we laugh over the crashes and falls, but those are the things that make memories. I occasionally fall _ we all do _ but until one of us gets hurt, it's still kinda funny.

Rick Brockway writes a weekly outdoors column for The Daily Star. Email him at robrockway@hotmail.com.