MY FRIENDS AND I SKI THESE SLOPES AS WE’D DONE MANY TIMES BEFORE, WITH NOBODY PARTICULARLY LEADING AND NOBODY FALLING BEHIND, TURNING LIKE A MURMURATION. AS NINTH GRADERS this drive took forever, and we plugged a miniature TV into the cigarette lighter to occupy our time. Now, the two-and-a-half-hour trip north from Kalamazoo, MI, to Crystal Mountain doesn’t feel long enough to catch up with my childhood best friend, Geoff Lindenberg. His parents had a house that was walking distance from the lifts where we spent nearly every weekend during our high school winters and then for races with our college ski team. It’s 37 degrees and spitting rain as we pull into Crystal. The mountain itself looks the same as it did 15 years ago, but the base village is hardly recognizable. Hotels, hot tubs and restaurants line the streets. The ski hill where I spent so many weekends is now a full-on resort. We hit the mountain in party mob fashion, traversing the entire hill and loading the lifts in different combinations with each run. Despite the mist, the snow feels nice under our skis—a bit wet, but firm enough to hold a deep carve. We lap a steep, wide burner at far skier’s right called Buck, a run I’d spent hours on in a past life, chasing sheer speed and skiing it slightly differently each time in search of the perfect line. It’s fun to ski a place loaded with so many memories, but there’s something special about your home hill in pure skiing terms too. Somewhere deep down is the knowledge of precisely how to ski these particular and unique slopes for maximum enjoyment. Knowing every pitch, every contour, every undulation and gully offers the ability to ski it fully, finding the highest G-force of a carve and the little spots that can make your stomach drop. My friends and I ski these slopes as we’d done many times before, with nobody particularly leading and nobody falling behind, turning like a murmuration. CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT “Marquette’s T-bar in all its glory. If we’d hit it on race league night, we could have danced to live bluegrass in unbuckled ski boots like old times.” Photo: Colin Clancy Rain corn harvest in full effect on an unseasonably soggy winter night at Crystal Mountain, MI. Photo: Colin Clancy “The mountain here may be relatively modest in size, but Marquette, MI, is a ski town through and through, as evidenced by the ski fence outside Blackrocks Brewery.” Photo: Colin Clancy Michigan 065
The Ski Journal Volume 17, Issue 1: Page 65
