A Recent Court Decision Changes The Legal Landscape For Skiers In Colorado. [Please consider supporting SeniorsSkiing.com with a donation. We appreciate your help. Click here.] Watch this video news story from Channel 7 News in Denver, CO. Basically, a recent December 2020 Appeals Court ruling has decided that skiers cannot bring action against ski resorts, expanding protection for resorts, releasing[Read More…]
Lodges Closed. Back To Basics. [Please consider supporting SeniorsSkiing.com with a donation. We appreciate your help. Click here.] Kudos to Loon Mountain Resort, N.H., for managing COVID restrictions so well. Our family bubble all agreed the best thing Loon had done was shut down all the lodges to indoor food service. That simplified one’s strategizing. Grab ‘n Go food windows[Read More…]
Poor Marg. She Becomes A Poster Person For Travel Insurance. [Please consider supporting SeniorsSkiing.com with a donation. We appreciate your help. Click here.] When I think back over the last two decades, our group of skiing fanatics have been largely injury free. We are a large group of friends comprised of both Australian and British skiers. But there was Morzine.[Read More…]
Does The World Need A Custom Ski Just For You? [Please consider supporting SeniorsSkiing.com with a donation. We appreciate your help. Click here.] Way back in the winter of 2018, long before Covid raised its ugly head, I asked the heads of marketing (none of whom would qualify for a SeniorsSkiing/com subscription) from three manufacturers a simple question: “Has ski[Read More…]
That’s the simple question, would you like to improve your skiing and enjoy it more? [Please consider supporting SeniorsSkiing.com with a donation. We appreciate your help. Click here.] Would you love skiing as much if you were a wedge skier? Probably not. What about a pretty good parallel skier, but anxious on the more challenging black diamond runs? Maybe you’d[Read More…]
Supporting SeniorsSkiing.com, Time For Gratitude, StratWarm, XC Ski Length, Reflections On Comments, Best Restaurant Ever, Odyssey Between US And Canada, And More Ski Art. About eight years ago, Jon Weisberg, a college friend and fraternity brother, mentioned on a holiday phone call that he had been thinking about starting a website for senior skiers. He even chatted up fellow senior[Read More…]
Hint: Cold Air Coming Your Way. [Please consider supporting SeniorsSkiing.com with a donation. We appreciate your help. Click here.] I assume that this week’s headline has many of you scratching your head wondering “What in the world is a stratwarm?” I will try and explain but the bottom line is that this phenomenon is in large part responsible for the[Read More…]
Half-Way Through The Season, Pat McCloskey Takes Stock. [Please consider supporting SeniorsSkiing.com with a donation. We appreciate your help. Click here.] We are halfway through winter, and the groundhog has come out to let us know what he thinks about the rest of the winter. I wonder if he will be masked? In any event, this has been a different[Read More…]
Our Traveling Australian Skier Recalls Characters, Odd Places, And Skiing In The US/Canadian West. [Please consider supporting SeniorsSkiing.com with a donation. We appreciate your help. Click here.] Have you been to Curlew, WA? We try several routes in an attempt to exit the USA, having already skied at Schweitzer Ski Resort. When I say skied, I use the term advisedly.[Read More…]
Mid-Winter, Ski Art, SmartPhone Photography, XC Booming, Question About Racing, Reminiscence, Skiing Weatherman, AI Ski Coach, Rx Goggles, And More. Jon WeisbergComing soon: Prognosticator of Spring.We are approaching the middle of the winter season, and Ground Hog Day, coming up next week on Feb. 2, marks the half way point till spring. Hope you have half your firewood and half[Read More…]
Terrain Opens Coast to Coast In my mind, the end of January is roughly the mid-point of the season and as we hit that mark, the slopes of North America are in good shape from coast to coast. There are a few spots here and there where trail counts and base depths are lacking a bit, but overall, the very[Read More…]
XC Is Hot And Getting Hotter. The Cross Country Ski Areas Association (CCSAA) has been conducting online sessions with its cross country (XC) ski area members since last spring, focused on sharing information about how XC operations should respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Discussions resulted in widespread adoption of plans aimed at minimizing risk of virus transmission for staff and[Read More…]
Don’t Lug Your DSLR. Smartphones Can Do It. Do you want to take better photos with your Smartphone? Transform your friends into Alpine or Nordic heroes? Mark D. Phillips, a former AP photographer, is used to lugging around SLRs and long telephoto lenses for photographing ski racing. Increasingly, for sheer convenience, he uses an Smartphone to get good high quality[Read More…]
A Ski Patrolman Rises To The Challenge. Before I ever had a ski lesson, I had become a ski patrol director, certified (the highest level) by both the National Ski Patrol and the Professional Ski Patrol Association. One morning while working at a small ski area (240 feet of vertical), I was called into the base lodge by the woman[Read More…]
Have You Raced? When? What Did You Learn? We are curious how many of our readers have actually been involved in ski racing in the long arc of their skiing careers. Did you race in college? High school? World Cup circuit? Olympics? Or just the odd NASTAR race at the local hill? Regardless what level you raced or your degree[Read More…]
Fwoosh! By Matthew Haddad (Age 12) [Editor Note: This poem was written when Matthew was 11 for his grandfather SeniorsSkiing.com reader Doug Haddad. Proud grand dad submitted it on his behalf.] Past snowy hills On a 100 degree down Intricate snowflakes Frozen hearted yet making a winter wonderland Where skiing takes place Over thousands of moguls Making the snow a[Read More…]
Does Technique Matter? Corduroy XC Tracks, Beginning XC, Making Turns, Think Arc, Robert Frost, How Did You Learn? This week we reflect on how you ski and how you learned. We learned by following a fellow college student down the baby trails at Song Mt in Tully, NY, many decades ago. “Just do this”, he said showing me how to[Read More…]
The Technical Reason Why Ski Trails Are Corrugated. [Editor Note: This article was written in collaboration with Auguste Lockwood, Yellowstone Track Systems.] Interest in winter recreation promises to grow phenomenally in winter 2020-’21, despite—or because of —COVID-19, and a lot of us are looking forward to more friends and families on more and better groomed trails. One of the subtle,[Read More…]
Snow For All. Often when I write this piece, I have good news for one region of the country and not-so good news for other areas of ski country. Such is the nature of winter weather across a country that stretches 3,000 miles from coast to coast and with so many and varied climate zones. However, just as there are[Read More…]
Did How You Learn Help Or Hinder Your Current Technique? I remember taking couple of lessons when I started skiing in the mid-60s. Lessons were based on the snow-plow, stem christie, christie school. Very Austrian. It served me well over the years I skied up to the time my Alpine career went on hiatus. When I came back to skiing[Read More…]
Easy Does It And Find The Rhythm. If you look at Henrik Kristoffersen here in the blue Norwegian National Team uniform doing slow turns, you will see the value of mechanics at a basic level. The important thing that I realized in watching Kristoffersen executing basic turn maneuvers at a very slow pace is that we all can work[Read More…]
Or the Willy-Nilly Slide By Robert Frost (1916) Brown lived at such a lofty farm That everyone for miles could see His lantern when he did his chores In winter after half-past three. And many must have seen him make His wild descent from there one night, ’Cross lots, ’cross walls, ’cross everything, Describing rings of lantern light. Between the[Read More…]
Don’t Let The Old Man In, Vortex Coming, More Poetry, Luxury XC Resort, Ski World Art, Season Pass Value, Ski Boot For Seniors, Norway . My self-image has always been as an active, healthy, strong, relatively athletic person who also happened to be 76 years old. Friends were frequently impressed when they learned my age. “Really? You certainly don’t look[Read More…]
The Vortex Is Coming. Last week I discussed a major pattern change that would unfold over North America this month. As we hit the midpoint of January, those changes are well underway. An episode of stratospheric warming over the far northern reaches of the hemisphere has matured in typical fashion, leading to the displacement of the polar vortex away from[Read More…]
Luxury Ranch Includes Gourmet Food And Outdoor Sports. I’m a winter guest (or “dude”) ranch specialist – ski at them, write about them, consult with them, love them. Which is a little ironic because when you think “ranch,” you probably also think “horses!” – but I’m a wondrously inept horseman, whatever the season. I’ve been lucky enough to visit maybe[Read More…]
