Spring is King

At the end of his mostly solitary voyage across America, Chris McCandless wrote in his journal “Happiness is only real when shared”. 

Now this year might have felt like a lot of things, including a solitary voyage across some vast and lonely expanse, but it needn’t feel that way forever.

Spring is a time of reunification for skiers. A time when we stop and breathe again. 

We emerge from the cold recesses of our lonely ambitions to let the sun warm our faces. 

We revel in this short window of satiation, when the cold hands of our addiction slip and fail to contain our distended souls. 

And with our newfound freedom we seek to fill our hearts. We reach out to relatives we haven’t seen in months, we sleep (at last), we stay up all night, we gather in the warmth of the sun and dance in the fading daylight. 

….and we ski with our friends again. 

This cannot be understated. We ski with all our friends again. Powder is a blessed thing but it’s demons cannot be ignored. Powder skiing is, in many ways, a solitary experience. A very personal pursuit that perpetuates a very personal focus. The exact run you had can never be repeated–by experiencing it you’ve killed it–and there’s an extreme beauty in that fact.

But there’s also beauty in the opposite. The electric connections that form by following friends and down wiggles and bumps, looking into their eyes and seeing their smiles and knowing exactly how they feel, because you were there too. 

Powder is a dream, but slush is real happiness.