A LOW ANGLE LOVE AFFAIR Jim Ryan and Max Martin sample a bounty of beautiful corduroy on Jackson Hole Mountain Resort’s Easy Does It. Photo: Stephen Shelesky LINES Words ARIEL KAZUNAS IT’S 9:07 A.M. on a random midweek morning. I am alone and it hasn’t snowed in a week. The sun is shining. The corduroy is popping. I am about to ski the best run at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort: Easy Does It. Maybe it’s antithetical to write a love letter to a low angle blue run at a resort with a reputation for steep terrain and sustained vertical drop. But Easy Does it, or EDI, as it’s called by so many adoring fans, deserves the praise—praise that is so often only reserved for its better-known siblings like Corbet’s Couloir. Sure, EDI is just a minor link of groomed terrain off the Casper Chair, over almost before you’ve even registered you’re on it. And sure, EDI is often a blood clot of red-coated schoolers drooling over their own turns or using the run’s relatively mellow slope to teach others their ABCs (“always be carving”). I don’t care. I still love EDI. Why? Because EDI loves me back. Did I wake up feeling like the absolute farthest thing from an athlete? One lap down EDI will convince me I am World Cup material. Am I having one of those “Yes, actually, today, Satan!” kinds of afternoons? Ten wall-to-wall turns down EDI will keep me from selling my soul. Skiing EDI is the equivalent of getting a bear hug from Robin Williams or hearing a bedtime story from Morgan Freeman. There is no world in which a cruise through EDI’s calming, encouraging, patient, welcoming terrain will not leave me feeling at least 69% better than I did beforehand. I have been known to blast Yo-Yo Ma’s rendition of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major on repeat in my headphones while spinning EDI laps. There is poetry embedded in that slope, especially on a high and dry morning when no one else is out and the blank page that is a fresh groomer awaits like a favorite notebook and pen. Yo-Yo gets it. I learned to ski at Jackson Hole as an adult. Back then, there was no Sweetwater Gondola to take me right to Casper Chair and EDI. I had to grit my teeth through the double-blues off of the Apres Vous Chair, steep rolls and terrifying machine-made snow that iced up like a windshield in Febru-ary. I still feel my heart drop now, 10 years and leaps and bounds of skiing progression later, skiing those runs. But there was payoff to the pain: EDI, of course. A beacon of hope for my never-ever self, shining in all its non-judgmental glory. EDI, where it felt possible to trust my body and my skis. EDI, where I learned to accept my budding love for a sport that now defines who I am, how I make a living, and where I find so much of my joy. Since then, EDI has watched as I ushered in a new era of understanding edges (thank you, Coach MB), and as I came into my own as a mentor to other adult learners who also needed that safe space called EDI. And EDI is still where I go, today, when seeking a place to ski and simply be . Because as the name implies, “Easy Does It” is a literal requirement (the run is very flat, after all) and a figurative ask: enjoy yourself. I have a feeling every ski resort has its own EDI somewhere within its boundaries, and that we all have a little EDI within our own psyches—that beautiful, precious place we can go to take ourselves and our sport a little less seriously. So, no, EDI is not going to be the run that sells t-shirts to tourists. And, no, skiing EDI will never earn me any points in the Game of Gnar. Maybe that disqualifies it from “Best Run On the Mountain” for some. But in my book, EDI will forever hold the crown. 036 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 18, Issue 1: Page 36
