Off-season rain is a tease, a tickle. It plasters the windows, the hills, cars, roads, chairlifts. You stare out through the gloomy gray, check the temperature, and do the math: Another twenty degrees and this would be snow…another thirty and it’s blower…one inch of rain equals a foot of snow…four inches already today, if it were January that would be…oh my God.
In-season rain exists to justify the cost of three-layer Gore-Tex. To weed out the weak and uncommitted and test the fortitude of ski resort operators. And so you can tell yourself you’re core. But are you? If you’re a weekend warrior with a Sugarbush house and you wake to Saturday rain (welcome to Vermont, baby!) and slush around for two hours…that’s not core, that’s a desperate (though understandable) justification of all the money you’ve spent to be there. Okay, you get points, but just a few. If you’re a season pass holder who lives at the mountain, works nights so you can ski days, and hammers it in a downpour bell to bell on President’s Day Saturday, you take the prize. And if you’re at Whistler getting drenched on the lower lifts, dude, go higher—it’s snowing up there.
Rain sucks in four ways. It can wash away a good snowpack in a matter of hours. It proves that waterproof-breathables don’t work when you sit on them. It sadistically suggests what it could be were it just a few degrees colder. And when it refreezes, it will leave a layer of ice that can haunt a snowpack until spring.
But all that wet can have a good side: It can take unconsolidated Twinkie snow, strip out squishly middle and make it uniform and safe. It can condense a weak band of angel-food cake into a hearty foundation of fudge, solid enough to set the snowpack up for a long and stable after party. It can plaster skiable snow to the steepest slopes. Best of all, it can take the most homogenous slope of man-made artificiality, massage the top layer, and turn that uninspired mank into something sweet, soft, and edgeable. Carving in the rain might even rival corn skiing.
Yeah, right. But it’s still skiing, god love it.
Flickr photos used under Creative Commons license. Top: Snowshoe, West Virginia by bikesandbooks. Bottom: Mad River Glen, Vermont, by megnut.
THE SERIES
The Elements of Skiing: Wind
The Elements of Skiing: Shade
The Elements of Skiing: Waiting for the Weather
The Elements of Skiing: Corn
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
What? No pictures of us Washington skiers getting drenched on the steeps of Alpental and Crystal?
The 5th way rain sucks: it freezes you to the core on your chairlift ride up the slopes! Great post. I’ve been skiing since I was 3, rain or shine.
-Jodi
There were many days of my youth, as a Junior ski patroller at Pico, VT that shaped me into who I am today… skiing in the rain. Some days I miss the bone chilling cold of the frozen dampness that would come from the combination of three layers of cotton, no Gore-Tex, and 50 mile an hour winds and 35 degree temperatures. Add to that a fixed grip, 12 minute chairlift ride, and you have a unique, character building experience.
Do you remember how your hands would turn the color of the leather of your gloves from being soaked in them all day?
Those were the days.