Hot Buttered Corn Snow

Powderhorn’s closing day on Easter Sunday delivered perfect corn. Corn snow, that is.

Slow Lift Movement

People bitch about old, slow chairlifts, but they have their up-sides.

Alta’s Alf Engen used to say he preferred the crowd hanging up in the air, rather than descending the slopes en masse.

X (Rated)

I had three reasons for going over to Aspen last Friday during the XGames. One was to meet up with skiing friends who have known each other since childhood and tell the most amazing tales on chairlift rides. Like the time one of them had a tarantula the size of a grapefruit in his swim trunks.

Early Season IQ Test

OK, kids. It’s that time of year again when the skiing juices start to flow – even if the sky has yet to loose the white stuff.

The Telluride Film Festival has come and gone. The Imogene Pass Run is history. The season, the reason we’re here, waits just around the corner and thoughts turn – in dreams, certainly, and in moments less appropriate – to sliding down a frozen mountain. How ready are you for those first gliding turns? Take this simple test and find out.

Messing With Ski Shapes, Part Two

The battle continues over new ski shapes dictated for 2013 by the International Ski Federation.

The debate blows hot on the slopes and in the blogosphere. (Although we haven’t heard lately from American giant slalom specialist Ted Ligety, who protested early in the season that the FIS was attempting to “ruin” his sport.)

Turning Back the Skiing Clock

My mother says she doesn’t always “get” the things I write about skiing. Full disclosure, Mom: Look out! This one’s about sidecut and turn radius, and what some World Cup skiers – most notably outspoken Americans Ted Ligety and Bode Miller – see as an attempt to send ski racing back to the Hickory Age.

Trend Report: Old Is New

I don’t blame them. The editors. Ski magazine’s Buyers Guide is down to a 98-page weakling. So, they should be forgiven for hyping a bunch of product “trends” as “cutting edge,” when in fact they are either old ideas coming around again or subtle tweaks in proven technologies and materials. At least one “trend” – the one on the parity, finally, of women’s performance boots with men’s models – just made me laugh. It’s the same old “You’ve-come-a-long-way-Baby” sales pitch.

What Would Leonardo Think?

When the helicopter comes in to pick you up, it’s like a tornado arriving from across the snow. Or a mega-mutant, angry bee.

As the (Ski Racing) World Turns

Lindsey Vonn said she was “devastated” by the cancellation of the last race at the World Cup Finals in Lenzerheide, Switzerland on Saturday.

It was perhaps an unfortunate word choice given the literal devastation suffered in Japan just a few days previous.

Private Skiing

There’s a famous wave in Indonesia called Nihiwatu. It peels across the beachfront of an exclusive resort on the island of Sumba, east of Bali. The wave proceeds from left to right – that is looker’s left, if, for example, you were nursing a beer in the resort’s open-air dining room and gazing out to the horizon.