RIPPLE EFFECT SKIING IS A HASSLE. No one knew that better than my grandparents, Tom and Hilda, who hauled some combination of their nine kids up to Bear Valley, CA, from the Bay Area weekend after weekend in a 1971 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser. The Moldsmobile, a moniker unfondly bestowed upon it after an unfortunate rainstorm with the windows down, rat-tled up into the Sierra, four-plus hours each way, frequently bursting at the seams with kids, utilizing the front, back, way back and unofficial way-way back seat, also known as the trunk. At the time, it was just something to do, a way to enter-tain the whole family at once, the ski resort being the perfect place to turn half a dozen kids loose and not think too hard about what might happen. My grandparents learned to ski in their 50s, after some of their oldest children had moved out of the house and discovered the sport. Tom and Hilda embraced it with a fervor, and after a few seasons making day trips, they went all in and rented out a cabin for the entire season: a three-bedroom A-frame in the woods that required a 10-minute snowmobile ride to access. Grandpa would captain a bright yellow 1970 Ski-Doo with a pull-behind cargo trailer, loaded up with the same cast that had just piled out of the Moldsmobile, plus a few dangling off the back on skis. An aerospace engineer by trade, Grandpa could fix anything. Skis too long? No worries, a hacksaw will fix that in a jiff. The Ski-Doo was always in slight disrepair, and it wasn’t out of the ordinary to stroll into the kitchen and find the carburetor boiling in Grandma’s pasta pot on the stove. Every morning, he was always last out the door, a plastic comb stuffed in his chest pocket, his tool of choice for scraping snow off kids’ boots. My grandparents hardly ever got off the green runs, but they sure did love it. “It’s snowing up in the mountains,” Grandpa would trill, whenever the rain poured outside the kitchen window. They’d scour ski swaps and garage sales to outfit their gaggle of kids, whose schedules had grown full, but never too full for a weekend of skiing. My Aunt Kathy, who was in college, took it upon herself to sew gaiters for her younger siblings to protect their jeans from filling with snow (hot pink, because that was the fabric on sale). Over 50 years later, I sat around a long wooden table at the Sentry Lodge, a remote hut in BC’s Selkirk Mountains, Lily Krass Ritter enjoying blue skies and a fresh coat of paint in British Columbia’s Selkirk Mountains. Photo: Matt Patterson CR UX Words LILY KRASS RITTER with my 60-year-old mom and my cousin Mickey. As we inhaled post-ski nachos, we pointed out the window reliv-ing the best runs of the day, tracks still glimmering in the evening light across the valley. Chasing powder has been a huge part of all three of our lives, something that has al-lowed us to create so many memories of our own, despite living multiple states away from each other. Pulling off a trip like that certainly falls into the category of major hassles. But that seed was planted half a century ago thanks largely to my grandparents’ tenacity to keep piling kids into the Moldsmobile and driving all that way up to Bear Valley. When you trace the root of something back to its origin, it can often seem small or insignificant. Not that wrangling a herd of middle and high schoolers 200 miles through the California mountains was any small feat. But by no means were my grandparents trying to create world class skiers. There was no ski school, no fanfare about the identity of being a skier. Still, it stuck with a lot of my aunts and uncles. And then, a few decades later, that same dancing-in-the-kitchen-because-it’s-snowing-somewhere love for skiing was gifted to me. And boy did it really stick. No matter how much joy skiing brings you, the truth is: getting out the door is hard. When the traffic is raging, legs are tired and house projects loom, sleeping in sounds attractive. But just getting in the car and going, whether it’s for one day or a hundred, is certainly better than not skiing. It doesn’t have to define you. It might just be something you do because you ran out of shit to keep your kids en-tertained. But it’s worth doing. Even if you end up with a sawed-off pair of skis and hot pink homemade gaiters. You never know what might stick. 024 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 18, Issue 1: Page 24
