Epic days at Whiteface, the ghost of seasons past.

Asking me what the most epic day I’ve ever experienced at Whiteface is like asking a mother who her favorite child is. There have been so many days, both good and bad, worth remembering on that mountain. Many of the days blend into one another. Most of my strongest memories on that mountain became memories before internet forums became a part of the vernacular. Most of these memories aren’t backed up with photos to remind me of what happened. Instead, these memories are backed up with smiles, amazement, and occasionally scars.

As a background to my few little moments that I’ve chosen to share, I would like you all to understand what Whiteface means to me. It is the mountain of my childhood, a mountain that is representative of something much larger than skiing. Although, I learned to ski at Magic Mountain and spent much of my first four or five years of skiing at Killington it was Whiteface where I matured.

When I was around eleven years old my father rediscovered his childhood passion of speed skating. My father had always loved skating. He taught me to skate when I was three, and by the time I was four I could hockey stop on both sides. In fact, with the exception of Golf, the sports that we bonded through the most were winter sports. He coached my hockey teams, and patiently skied greens (Great Eastern) and blues (Parron’s) with me for years. He held my hand, proverbially, when at age ten I stumbled onto outer-limits to go after a dropped glove from the lift. His love of winter rubbed off on me, and still does today.

And so when my father rediscovered his passion for speed skating, which started with short track at Chelsea Piers on the west side of Manhattan, he decided to visit Lake Placid for the first time in winter.  He went by himself at first, taking video for the family to entice us to come join him.  It wasn’t long afterwards that he was taking me up there on weekends. I would ski mornings with him and watch him skate in the afternoons. These weekends would happen frequently through junior-high and high school, and I loved them. It was on Whiteface, where we would talk things out, and it was on the ice rink where he would excel athletically, and that I, as a boy, could appreciate my father’s athletic prowess.

So, you can see that it isn’t easy for me to describe one epic day above all. Yet, I will try to scribble of a few moments that come easily to mind.

When I was in 8th grade, I guess about 14, we went up for presidents weekend.  On Saturday night it snowed some eight or nine inches. This was before the gondola existed, so we got on line for the valley quad 30 minutes before it opened. It was sunny and beautiful. We were the first on the chair, and so once off we headed down upper and lower valley. This was my very first experience with powder, and I can still remember what my turns looked like on the headwall just above the downhill finish gate.

Another memory was the first time I skied the slides. It was spring break my freshman year of college. That March, Whiteface had received a record amount of snow. In all my years skiing at Whiteface it was the only time to this day that I can’t remember ever scratching hard pack at all. My cousin was with us, and he too was very adventurous. My father, who isn’t, and wasn’t, as strong a skier as either of us opted not to join us in the slides. If I remember correctly, after we signed in with ski patrol we had to hike up some three hundred feet to access the top of the slides. The snow was fluff and the hike was brutal in my old Lange’s. Once we felt we had gone high enough, we cut across far skiers left, till we were just left of the icefall. The trip down was incredible. It was deep and steep, even if it had been somewhat skied off. Skiing the slides for the first time was comparable to a first kiss. It was awkward and scary, but having done it you’re never quite the same. The slide out was perhaps the scariest part for me at the time. I went flying through the tight path through the trees, completely paranoid that I was going to catch an edge at any moment. Luckily, I didn’t and I was changed as a skier. Looking back at it, I’m amazed I did it then, especially knowing how much weaker a skier I was.

Finally, the last memory I will leave you with is perhaps the one that is still the most vivid in my mind’s eye. I was a senior in high school. It was a very cold weekend that had been preceded by a warm week that included some rain. At the time my father was between skis and had opted to rent, although he brought his own boots. He had recently had a bad fall at Sunshine Village, and had been skiing warily ever since. When he signed for his rentals, he had asked that the DIN setting not be set too high, as he was worried about injuring his knee, and subsequently ruining his speed skating season.

The snow was firm, and we spent most of the day following the path of the snowmakers and groomers. For the most part we had done well. We ate lunch at Boule’s Bistro and from the window my father saw that Lower Mackenzie had been groomed. He stated that after lunch we would make our way up to the top of Little Whiteface, and go down Mackenzie. The mistake was that Wilderness had been groomed, as well as lower Mackenzie, but Upper Mackenzie was filled with frozen VW Beetles. If we had been smart we would have cut through Wilderness to get to Lower Mackenzie. Instead, we entered Mackenzie, which at the time didn’t have a single flake of snow. It was literally a bumped up ice field. I went ahead of my father, albeit hesitantly.

I wasn’t far into the trail when I remember looking up at my father some twenty feet above me. He initiated a turn. The sound was like fingernails running down a chalkboard. It was at this moment that his uphill ski simply popped off (the DIN was set too low.) My father then edged in hard with his downhill ski to arrest his slide. The result: the other ski popped off too. At this point he was left with nothing to grip the ice. He seemed to slide past me in slow motion, accelerating over one bump, then another, and another, all the while trying to get his pole to dig into the pack. Eventually he slammed into a bank of trees where Mackenzie turns right. Yet his fall wasn’t fully arrested. He slid a good twenty feet into the glades below. I skied as fast as I could to him, although admittedly it wasn’t very fast. When I arrived his face was bloodied pretty well. His head had grazed a tree and left his forehead with a pretty bad gash. Fortunately at the time I had been training as a lifeguard, and was carrying some gauze. I wrapped up his head, and coolly collected his skis. He said he was ok to ski down, and so I helped him snap into his bindings and led him out of the glades onto Lower Mackenzie and then down to the base. After checking with patrol and first aid he went to the hospital, where he received twenty stitches on his upper forehead. Nowadays you can’t even see the scar, which is a true testament to the quality of the doctors up there. Although, the fall had to do with my father and not myself, it is still the scariest moment I have yet to have on a mountain.

Perhaps this little collection of memories isn’t epic in the conventional meaning by way of the skier’s dictionary. However, these are a few of the memories that have stuck with me best, based on the mountain that I’ve skied more than any other in my life.  

Wonderful memoire and well written too. I hope your father reads this!

Great tales and storytelling.  Thanks so much for posting it.

Rob... roughly what years are we talking about here?

Harvey44 wrote

Rob... roughly what years are we talking about here?

These particular stories span from about 94' till 2001'.