This Week In SeniorsSkiing.com (April 10)

Season Wrap: It Was A Very Good Season Until It Wasn’t.

[Editor note: We’re including a few notable pics from the year to accompany this article.]

And so ends the sixth publishing year of SeniorsSkiing.com.  A little earlier than planned.  We had some spring skiing in mind around mid-March; we bet you did, too. Nothing is constant but change.

As we move into the blooming part of Spring 2020—the weather breaking, nature waking up—we have to be grateful for what we did have this year. So, in this last This Week of the publishing year, we are going to look back.

The Women’s World Cup on Thanksgiving Weekend at Killington was, luckily, an act of kindness from the snow gods. Thanks to an early snowstorm, there was snow for racing. And the East was poised to have another fantastic year. California also had a early snow. Hopes were up.  Little did we know the season would be U-shaped, snow-wise, when all was said and done. Rockies, BC, Northwest, mostly great to fantastic. The report card for 2019-20: All good West (not California), Meh, East. Maybe next year.

SeniorsSkiing.com continued to publish its directory of 157 ski resorts where seniors could ski for free or almost free. We defined almost free as deeply discounted lift tickets and season passes.  We keep uncovering more of these bargain spots, thanks, in part, to referrals from our readers. We can still download that directory. Note: You will have to re-enter your name and email to access subscriber-only content.

We also published our yearly list of skis for seniors, thanks to our partnership with Realskiers.com. That is still available, too, as a download. Note: You will have to re-enter your name and email to access subscriber-only content.

This season, we had technique tips from Bob Trueman, Pat McCloskey, and Marc Liebman, as well as a new Ask The Expert series, where reader questions were fielded by industry savants. We published personal memoirs about last turns of the season and Moriarty hats, profiles and obits of ski personalities, and fitness routines, personal stories of knee replacements, and health tips especially for seniors. We had a series of pre-season puzzles to keep readers’ interests engaged while we waited for the weather to turn colder.

We also published resort reviews, based on visits by our correspondents, and a collection of cross-country skiing articles, about places, technique, and news.

We were happy to publish the Skiing Weatherman’s weekly predictions all season long.  Thanks to Herb Stevens for delivering interesting analyses of how the weather works.  We actually learned a lot about troughs and ridges in the process.

We published over 20 Mystery Glimpse pictures contributed by the many fabulous ski museums around North America. In looking at your guesses, we realized there are many astute observers of ski history out there.  Thanks for playing the game.

This February, we had our second fundraiser. We were humbled and grateful for the wonderful contributions from our readers that will keep this enterprise going. 

Finally, this year’s Incidents And Accidents series has led to important recommendations, shaped by our readers, to make the on-slope experience safer for everyone.  We are currently bringing our findings to the ski industry for their reaction and action. We will report how that project is processing over the next few months.  Bear in mind, the ski business is pre-occupied with virus management, so we are treading carefully and patiently.

Our Magnificent Correspondents

SeniorsSkiing.com could not exist without the contributions of our correspondents, most of whom are professional journalists. Most of these writers have been with SeniorsSkiing.com since we started six years ago. We hope you appreciate their work; we can’t thank them enough.

This year’s regular contributors are:

• Harriet Wallis, Salt Lake City, UT
• Roger Lohr, Lebanon, NH
• Tamsin Venn, Ipswich, MA
• Pat McCloskey, Sewickley, PA
• Marc Liebman, Savannah, TX
• Don Burch, South Windsor, CT
• Joan Wallen, Andover, NH
• Bob Trueman, Welshpool, Wales
• Herb “Skiing Weatherman” Stevens, Wakefield, RI
• Mike Roth, Albany, NY
• Rose Marie Cleese, San Francisco, CA
• Yvette Cardozo, Issaquah, WA
• Mary Jo Tarallo, Rehoboth Beach, DE

And thanks to the one-time contributors who made it to our pages.

This Week

Co-Publisher Jon Weisberg reviews Roam Robotics Elevate, a computer-assisted exo skeleton, that supplies subtle support and a completely different approach to assistive ski devices.

We reveal last week’s Mystery Glimpse picture from the Tread Of Pioneers Museum, Steamboat Springs, CO.  One reader did a Sherlock-like job connecting the dots, deducting the right answer by reading the clues in the article and pic. Nice work.

We reprise a verse from Two Tramps In Mud Time, by Robert Frost, which fits the temperament of April. We have also included a link to Frost reading the poem himself. The Snow In Literature series has been fun for us to curate, and we’re glad we’ve reached a number of readers. Just shows you there’s another part of winter besides resorts, skis, gear, etc.

Thanks for reading SeniorsSkiing.com.  Take good care in these disruptive days. We will publish monthly over the non-snow months. 

Remember, there are more of us every day, and we aren’t going away.