There's not too many things in this world that scare our son, who started skydiving in high school. But when I described seeing skiers and boarders speeding across a mountain lake near Frisco, Patrick's response was, "Geez, THAT'S dangerous."

I don't know, paraskiing looked like fun to me. Besides, you don't need to buy a lift ticket.


More paraskiing pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Katharine.Gillette/Paraskiing

It didn't seem like a big deal when I hit a patch of ice and fell skiing at Arapahoe Basin ("A-Basin" as it's known to locals) on New Year's Day. I picked myself up, finished that run, and even did one more before before calling it a day.

By the time we got home, though, I couldn't straighten my right arm or bend it enough to touch my shoulder. And there was that teeny-weeny matter of excruciating pain, which is how we came to spend nearly four hours in the ER on the first day of 2009.

There was too much swelling around my elbow to get a clear image, but the docs said that the pattern of swelling on the X-ray was indicative of a fracture of the radial bone. Depending on what the orthopedic specialist says when I see him on Tuesday, I could be off the slopes for over a month.

In the meantime, I refuse to let Alison have one of my newly prescribed Percocets for her residual aches and pains from skiing. (She's 25, for God's sake, how many aches and pains could she really have?) I also wish that there had been a little less ice and lot more powder at A-Basin on Thursday, so that my landing could have been as soft as Patrick's was at Keystone last Sunday.

When we lived in Brussels, we loved being able to get to Paris in an hour and 20 minutes via high-speed train.

We discovered yesterday that we can get from our driveway to the slopes at Keystone in exactly the same amount of time. It's not the rooftops of Paris, but the panorama appeared equally dreamlike to our Midwestern eyes.

By the way, the "Slow Trail of the Day" (indicated by the yellow sign on the right) proved to be a real gift as my muscles struggled to remember how to ski after nearly three years off the slopes.

(Photo courtesy of Jim and his Blackberry)

Unlike many skiers, I enjoy riding slow chairlifts. In addition to giving aching, middle-aged muscles a rest, you get to see a lot of things from a lift, and not just hotdoggers who ski so well you feel like retreating to the lodge for the rest of your skiing life.

At Lake Louise, we listened to a middle-aged man coax his furious, scared wife down a moguls run, shouting, "I'm SORRY, I'm SORRY, honey" as she inched down the bumps. Bet he had to sleep in the hotel lobby that night.

At Nub's Nob, I watched a little boy, still in the pole-free stage of learning to ski, flapping his arms like a baby bird as he tried to get some "air" on a miniature snow ramp.

My all-time favorite is the orange lift on the back hills of Nub's Nob. It ascends through a quiet forest, where tiny birds dart back and forth. On the orange lift, you can go eyeball-to-eyeball with a squirrel scampering up a tree. The clinking of the old metal lift parts sounds like Buddhist temple bells among the snow-covered pines.

Mostly, sitting on the slow chairlift gives my mind a chance to meander around aimlessly, which, while not particularly productive, is recuperative in its own way. So when I watched "Solilochairliftquist," which was profiled in the Sunday Denver Post, I knew that I wasn't the only skier who felt, as the article's title puts it, "the Zen of a slooow chairlift."

Just two days ahead of setting a new record for the latest "first snowfall of the season" in Denver, we woke up to a white backyard this morning.

Snow is serious business here. An editorial—an editorial, not just an op-ed piece—in yesterday's Denver Post gave us something else to worry about other than the global financial crisis, the Iraq war, and whether there will be any jobs for newly minted JDs when Patrick graduates next month. The headline read "Little snow, quick lifts create chaos on slopes," adding the ominous subhead: "With resorts opening earlier and thousands of skiers urged to use one or two runs, dangerous situations are likely to result."

Although, as the editorial further observed, "Dude, we totally don't want to look like wussies," it was a relief to see real—as opposed to machine-made—white stuff sticking to the Front Range even after it vanished from our yard. Moving from the gentle slopes of the northern Lower Peninsula to skiing the Rockies is going to be challenging enough without having to worry about getting run over by a cast of thousands.