How Skiing on New Year's Day Taught Me Optimism

On winter weekends and holidays, I'm a ski instructor at Stratton Mountain. So the morning of January 1st, I woke up early to head down to the ski school, in case any last-minute clients had signed up for a lesson. Nope. (That morning is one of the slowest of the year, for obvious reasons; most people start skiing around 10:30.)

It didn't help that the first day of 2012 was cloudy and raw. You couldn't see the top of the mountain from the bottom of the American Express lift.

What a year, I grumbled to myself, as I took Amex, then skied over to the Ursa lift, which goes all the way to the top. It's been one warm day after another, and we haven't had a real snow storm since Halloween.

On Ursa, things went from bad to worse. Halfway up, you couldn't see anything. It had rained a bit the night before, and the temperatures were now just cold enough to make the Tamarack trail underneath me treacherously slippery.

We had a full house: three kids, plus another family of four. Two other families we know were staying right across the parking lot. We are almost never all together; what a shame to waste it on a foggy, icy day.

Then a miracle happened. My lift chair rised above the clouds, and I was greeted with gloriously blue skies. It was gorgeous at the top, and the sun had already warmed the snow enough to turn granular surfaces into soft spring snow.

We shifted our plans a bit, and decided to ski the aptly-named Sun Bowl instead of the expert slopes on the front of the mountain. New Year's Day turned out to be an amazing day of spring skiing, and nearly everyone we know came out to enjoy it.

This was a great reminder to me to remember to be optimistic. Some of the days on which you don't want to get out of bed turn out to be the best days of your life.

I hope the day is an omen for the rest of 2012, and that we all rise above the clouds to enjoy the magical times ahead of us.

Bruce Kasanoff blogs about skiing at Have Fun Skiing.