It seemed like an overly ambitious and vaguely absurd idea to take my eight-year-old son on a week’s ski vacation to Colorado. After all, he’d only skied five days in his life and that was on low-lying rolling hills, not mountains. Since it was just the two of us going to Colorado and I wouldn’t be able to leave him alone, I imagined spending the entire week on the bunny hill while I gazed way up at the sky-piercing powdery peaks with longing.
But this is something I learned that week: when it comes to skiing, kids are weirdly fearless. Sure, my child, as it turned out, isn’t brave about making small talk with friendly seat-mates on chairlifts—my chatting with strangers seemed to cause him so much embarrassment he’d freeze solid, staring ahead as if he didn’t know me—but the skiing part he tackled like a Swiss downhill racer on speed. No anxiety at all. I supposed this lack of fear in kids has something to do with them being closer to the ground than adults. But more than that, I believe it’s sheer naivety. They don’t know they could tear a ligament, or slip off an overhang unnoticed, or lose a whole finger. They don’t know they could be trapped in a snow bank until the spring thaw melts them into floppy carcasses. They haven’t lived long enough to figure these things out.
After the first half-hour on the bunny hill beside One Ski Hill Place in Breckenridge—the resort having the advantage that you can simply walk outside and step onto a chairlift—Quinn announced he was ready for the high mountains. “But this is the best bunny hill I’ve ever been on!” I told him. I was enjoying being ferried up the slow-moving sidewalks to the top of the hill and working on my turns going down. So what if I was surrounded by pre-schoolers. It was a blast. “Mummy, this is boring!” he pleaded.
I grudgingly agreed we’d try one of the mountains, but seeing how high they were, I worried that once we made it to the top, he’d be too afraid to come down. “It’s a long way up there, might take an hour,” I told him, “and the mountains are full of five-foot moguls.”
“Awesome!” he squealed, punching his fist in the air.
The first chairlift we rode took in sweeping views of Breckenridge’s myriad ski runs, endless long white ribbons cut into forests of the deepest green. Below, we watched jovial families skiing in multi-coloured ski garb calling out to meet at one restaurant or another; Argentinean sixty-somethings racing with helmet-cams; and snowboarders practicing their Shaun White jumps on special snowboarding ramps. Finally, we neared the top. “OK, we’ll be de-chairing soon,” I said, apprehension in my voice. Giggling at my airplane joke, he flipped up the bar as if this were a kiddie amusement ride, and proceeded to hop from the lift down to the ground.
“How did you know how to do that?” I asked, bewildered, as if someone must have kidnapped him in the night to show him what I remember being a terrifying ordeal when I learned to ski as a teenager.
“I watched the people in front of us,” he shrugged.
“Oh,” I said. But he didn’t hear me. He was skiing toward the nearest mountain edge along with the crowd. “There’s a green run over there,” I shouted out after him, meaning the colour-coding system to classify how difficult the slope is—green being easy; blue being not so bad; and black being yo is dead!
He obliged to take an easy green, one called Snowflake, but complained the whole way down that it felt more like cross-country skiing, a lot of hard work. Clearly, at 55 pounds, he was too light for Snowflake. On the next run, and the rest of that day and the next, we skied down blues together and I thought we’d hit our stride, our comfort zone for the rest of our skiing lives together contained in the colour blue. On those blue runs of Breckenridge, especially on the back bowls, I felt an exhilaration I hadn’t felt skiing in years, laughing nonstop with Quinn as we glided from one valley to the next, often having an entire blinding-white paradise of a mountainside in the sun all to ourselves.
But on the third day, some snotty-nosed ski brat standing behind us in a lift line bragged to his friends about having just gone up the Imperial Lift, the highest chairlift in North America. Quinn wanted to try it too. “But we like the blues!” I said.
It was futile. His face was too excited for me to refuse. Soon, we found ourselves at the highest elevation we’d been yet, and about to ascend further up a t-bar tow with a warning sign that read, “Experts Only Beyond This Point”. We went up anyway. We could always walk down if we had to, I reasoned, swallowing my panic. Next we rode the Imperial Lift itself, which catapulted us above the tree-line into an Arctic climate, an entirely different weather system than down below. Down below, we’d barely needed our jackets in the sun. Down below, people were drinking beer in t-shirts on outdoor patios, getting tanned. Up there, wind whipped our faces raw as we stepped off the lift. We spotted an elevation sign: 12, 840 feet. I was surprised we didn’t have altitude sickness.
I gazed around the mountaintop. It felt the way Everest must feel, a low persistent howling, thin crisp air, frozen dead bodies scattered around. I realized the only way down was a double-black diamond run. Not single black, but double black. “Let’s go!” shouted Quinn. He took off like a baby snow leopard chasing a tumbling rock. I watched in horror, the way one does when her offspring disappears down a cliff, but then, realizing he was skiing just fine, I ignored him to confront the sheer icy descent on my own. Criss-crossing the entire mountainside in dozens of near-horizontal back-and-forth lines, it took me half an hour just to get down to the Imperial Lift. Unlike my son, I understand about comas. Quinn, who’d been patiently waiting for me, wanted to go again.
It was getting late, so I talked him into going back to the bottom and drinking peppermint hot chocolate instead, and maybe later, going bowling at the lodge’s mineshaft-themed bowling alley. His face lit up and he agreed. He may be an expert skier, but he is, after all, still a kid.
Laurie Gough
*Note--This story was slated for the Toronto Star but the editor just told me his freelance budget was slashed and he couldn't publish stories he'd agreed to after all (not his fault; it's just the general state of things these days with the decline of print media). So I thought I'd stick it on my blog instead. Quinn is a bit older now and once he gets off his crutches, will start skiing again. (I'm actually not joking!)