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Ski season has already started. It's like Christmas
season. Stores used to wait until after Thanksgiving before
they hung up crepe-paper bells and piped in the Muzak
carols, but these days you hear Silent Night
while
shopping for trick-or-treat candy.
Ski resorts were also once content to wait until after Thanksgiving. But now they race to open early. Even with those early storms and their snow-making equipment, though, they really don't have much to offer yet.
Such skiing as you find this time of year is often atop man-made snow, which is almost as powdery as freshly-poured concrete. If the stuff under the lifts did fall from the sky, it didn't fall on the slopes. It's wind-packed nevé that had to be broken up, probably with jackhammers, before it could be hauled out from the shady spots under the trees.
That's a lot of expense and trouble when Mother Nature generally solves the problem within a few weeks. But ski areas don't have much choice. Like any other business, they must provide what their customers want. No matter how terrible the snow, by early November skiers want to ski.
Conversely, in March and April, the Rockies are brimming with exquisite snow. But do the skiers then enjoy those excellent conditions? Of course not. By that time of year, they've decided it's time to do something else. Any resort manager will tell you that every spring, he runs out of skiers long before he runs out of snow.
The obvious solution is to persuade skiers to be sensible. But we don't really want that. After they pondered the foolishness of being so eager to schuss and christy before Veterans Day, they might decide to give up stupidity altogether. And without people who will gladly pay $30 a day for the privilege of standing in line in order to slide down a mountain in subzero weather, Colorado's economy would be even worse off.
A few weeks ago, America went off Daylight Savings Time. It's a nuisance to have to reset every clock in the house, but Daylight Savings Time does provide certain benefits.
It also provides a solution to our problem with skiers who feel they must hit the slopes in early November. We use the clock concept, and adopt the Skiing Seasonal Calendar.
Every year, we would adjust our calendars at the end of October and start the month over, so that we would have two consecutive Octobers. After the second October, November (the current December) would come around. By Thanksgiving (about Christmas time) all our ski areas would be able to open, offering real heaven-sent powder. Colorado resorts could advertise how they always opened early with excellent snow conditions.
The new December would be the current January, the new January the current February, and so forth, until the end of March, when skiers decide that since spring has officially sprung, they ought to get out of the lift lines and start working on their tans.
At that time, we would again adjust our calendars.
Having two Octobers means that we need to give up a month:
April. In the mountains, April is known as Mud
Season.
No one will miss April, even though it will be
inconvenient to reset our calendars twice a year.
Generally I resent the inconveniences caused by the downhill ski industry in this state. Unless your mountain highway leads to a winter resort, you take your chances as to whether it will be plowed within a week after a storm. If perchance we get a mild winter so that normal travel is possible, then comes an immediate demand for snow-making; vacations for the idle rich are so important that the rest of us can maim or kill ourselves with black ice and ground blizzards.
Then there are the rental-car drivers who don't know how to navigate on snowy roads, the twenty-mile-long traffic jams in what ought to be serene wilderness, the degradation of cross-country skiing from solitary pleasure to a regimented fashion show, the predatory cocaine wholesalers and the airport congestion.
Given what we already put up with for the benefit of the ski industry, any annoyance caused by changing our calendars seems too insubstantial to worry about. And any year with two Octobers and no April has to be an improvement on the one we have now.
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