Life Happens: Becoming a Ski Dad

I didn’t really ski this year.

Okay, I mean, sure I skied every week of the winter, and yeah, I slid down plenty of vert on skis, and of course, I set my share of skin tracks, enjoyed plenty of ridge top time, and sucked cold air through a buff with snow flying in my face…Fine, maybe I have to concede I skied a lot this year, but it was different. I didn’t get any big days in the backcountry. I didn’t venture off into the big mountains. My summits were all familiar. I never slept in a tent in the snow. I skied no dawn-to-dusk ‘full days.’

My daughter was born last fall. Along with a myriad of major and wonderful life changes, I am becoming a ski dad. 

Riding a sleepless fall into winter expedited  an inevitable evolution in my availability, ambition, and risk tolerance. It’s an adjustment. I dashed to the mountains in between. In between work and picking up my daughter from daycare. In between bottle feeding and making dinner. In between peek-a-boo, and diapers, and crying, and laughing, and watching what my wife and I have come to call baby TV. Dawn patrol, dusk patrol, night patrol, whatever I could eek out to scratch that itch added up, but I feel like for the first winter in a long time, I was a bit of an indoor cat. 

 I have always sought out new corners of the mountains a bit further, higher, bigger, or weirder than whatever came before. I worried that the immense gravity of the mountains would somehow drain, should I return too often to the same slope. The antidote always seemed to be to embrace an ever-expanding universe, moving outward with the wandering constant of a good map and a bit of gumption.

 As it turns out, the pull of the mountains can strengthen with familiarity. 

The Chugach Front Range marks the eastern skyline above my hometown, Anchorage, Alaska. I have evangelized the virtues of skiing the Front Range for years but must admit I also often thought of it as a ‘training ground’ for ‘bigger’ adventures. This year, I dug deeper into the close to home. La Nina was an apt weather pattern given my life position and brought the best snow I have seen in the Front Range. Usually, we eek out windboard jump turns, surf below-zero facets, or scratch up bases on half-filled in rock piles. This year, the snow was perfect.