Liberty offers a nice semi-local ski option

Yesterday, I enjoyed my first trip this season to Liberty Mountain Resort for a day of skiing with my son and two of his friends. Despite temperatures in the mid-40s, the snow was slushy in the morning but pretty nice and powdery (by East Coast standards) all afternoon. 

It feels like a small miracle to get any skiing in nowadays with such noticeably short winters, but at least I’ve been to Copper Mountain in Colorado for five days, Whitetail also in Pennsylvania for one, now Liberty, and have another Copper trip planned in the coming weeks.

Liberty is just past the northern Maryland border in Pennsylvania and is typically packed on the front side with little tots learning to ski and all kinds of other people seemingly risking life and limb. I stay away from there but the kids like to ride the rails in the terrain park. There used to be a half pipe but it was difficult to cover it with main-made snow and wasn't open much, so it was removed. 

On the back side, there are two fun double black diamonds and a good handful of moguls. It’s amazing to see the amount of people taking brutal falls on those. No wonder there was an army of ski patrol lining some of the runs. There seems to be far more crashes than out west, with people falling left and right. One girl took a total face plant into the snow next to me. That might be ok in Colorado, where the powder could even feel refreshing to the face, but not at Liberty with this harder snow.

The East Coast resorts are definitely don't offer the same workout as ones in the Rockies. By comparison, the longest run is about a mile downhill at Liberty, with the longest one at Copper being three miles.

Also, Liberty's history is interesting. Itb was developed in the 1960s with big hopes to become a pretty massive destination. But it was bankrupt in the 1970s, purchased by a new owner and renamed Ski Liberty, which it remained until taking its current name in the 1990s. It has a 100+-room lodge and is a popular golfing spot in the summer, and it's now owned by Vail Resorts. The way the weather looks - warming up over the next couple of weeks - people may be golfing soon and not skiing much more at all this season. 

It's a very close call, but I like Whitetail just a little more than Liberty. Either way, it's nice to have ski options within a couple hours from home.

Reliving our pandemic Colorado ski trip at Copper Mountain

Our extended weekend at Copper Mountain - about an hour west of Denver along I-70 - has been a perfect escape from the post-holidays doldrums. We arrived late Wednesday night after an uneventful day of flying from BWI and got to ski Thursday through Sunday, with a morning of skiing still ahead tomorrow before flying back late into BWI.

Being back at Copper helped us relive the month we spent skiing there during the heart of the pandemic - in December 2020 and January 2021, but that time we stayed a 15-minute drive away and this time we were at the base of the mountain. The two-floor condo was as close at it gets to the Super Bee lift and Christy Sports, where I demoed possible ski choices to replace my ancient but beloved ones. It provided a comfortable and very pleasant setting for my family, our neighbors the Jones’, and my son’s friend Caio.

We didn’t see much of the teens, who were off on the hardest runs and the terrain park and also went to the Woodward skate and scooter facility. These videos show what my son is up to. Meanwhile, I took it pretty easy most of the time, as a casual but proficient skier who mainly likes to do the groomed blues, a few black diamonds, and good helpings of trees and moguls, especially with my 10-year-old daughter, who is a bit of a daredevil herself.

It’s nice to have a great condo because after skiing each day, there’s not much you want to do but eat, drink a little beer and whiskey, and veg out. That said, we also hit the ice rink, dinner with friend Sasha at JJ’s next to our condo, the snow maze, a beer and pool playing one night at the pizza joint in Center Village, and ample candy buying.

I’m already getting excited for our return trip to Copper in the spring.

Sports Illustrated, Pitchfork, and skiing provide great examples of the need to adapt to an always-changing world

News this week that Sports Illustrated has fired its entire staff and Pitchfork has been folded under GQ's operations is not exactly shocking, but it is very sad and yet another sign that mainstream, reliable journalism will get just a little bit harder to suss out. I had read SI since I was a little kid, always looking forward to the brilliant long-form journalism that "illustrated" so many compelling sports stories.  

The news reports have not been framed as total endings of these two esteemed publications, but the writing is clearly on the wall. And it's a big problem, especially because, for example, kids are getting their knowledge from often suspect social-media accounts and adults are internalizing and espousing information from their Facebook feeds and elsewhere that is from unknown or unreliable sources.

Those are examples of the many, many needs for the U.S. to implement media literacy in school curriculums so that, for example, we can all be spouting a lot less questionable misinformation to each other all day every day.

Another thing that is dying a bit in this country - like once-reliable media - is skiing, because snow has become so sporadic as weather patterns become different and more unpredictable. But that was not the case Saturday, when our family drive our kids and some of their friends to White Tail in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania near the Maryland border. It's about 90 minutes from home, and then it took us an hour in traffic for the last mile just to get to an over-full parking lot. I waited in the car for about another hour after that to wait for a parking spot to open up (and to deal with a dead battery in our friends' minivan that we borrowed) while the others got out and started skiing. The lift lines were nuts and it truly seemed that everyone in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia-Pennsylvania area had shown up to hit the slopes. Once getting past the base lift, however, it was pretty fun on the side mountain with the shorter lift lines and the more difficult runs, especially as the afternoon wore on. The crowds thinned because it was bitter cold and the Baltimore Ravens were playing in the football playoffs. 

The world and humans evolve very slowly, and we've moved slowly in the face of many difficult changes. Ski resorts will look very different in 100 years because of climate change. There will no doubt be some difficult times in the years ahead as those industries figure out how to adapt to changes in snowfall patterns and locations. Likewise, media and journalism has gone through monumental change in recent decades and we as humans have not figured out how to consume a much faster, voluminous, and constant flow of information yet. 

Best Magazine Reads: How I can relate to one man's vision for the perfect ski resort

All new employees at my workplace take an Emergenetics test so that all team members can be on the same page by playing off each other's talents. In my profile, I have a ton of red and yellow, which means I'm heavy on sociable and creative traits and less advanced on analytic and structural ones.

Maybe that's why I thought that an article in the April issue of Men's Journal, King of the Hill: How Vail Resorts Conquered the Ski Industry, is so intriguing. Rob Katz has built Aspen Resorts into a ski-resort behemoth, buying up resorts throughout North America and watching the company's stock become a darling of Wall Street.

Katz gives all new employees a similar personality test, and his personal traits are a lot like mine: red for "drive," while not being so strong at the analytical. That has smartly led him to focus on building incredible reams of data about his customers so he can channel that drive and emotion into the correct directions, directions he may not instinctively understand without that data.

Men's Journal notes that "the data is Vail's secret weapon, and not just because it helps people avoid lift lines." The company has an Epic Pass that allows Vail to know which runs skiers are taking, with whom, and can then market to them accordingly with, for example, pictures of aggressive skiers or moms and kids on the slope.

Despite the very uncertain future of the sport, even melting snows and increasingly unpredictable weather patterns are not keeping Katz and Vail from doing everything as right and enjoyable, from a business standpoint, as they possibly can. Even if it's a potentially short-term future.

That's the kind of venture I've always liked being a part of - having passionate leadership to do one small industry or corner of the world as absolutely as well as possible. It's a pretty inspiring magazine read.

Vacationing at Wintergreen Ski Resort Without Snow

Emmet, Jackson, and Frances check out a snake on one of Wintergreen's trails.

I've been skiing a bunch of times out west, but only once in the east. That running total held with a trip to Wintergreen Resort in western Virginia that Rachel, Jackson, Tony, Terry, Emmet, Frances, and I won at last year's Takoma Children's School silent auction.

There was no snow and not many other tourists, which made the weekend a little odd but pretty relaxing. Or as relaxing as a weekend with three 5-ish-year-olds can be.

We took two decent-length hikes through the leafy, mountainous trails and mostly just explored the resort. There was also a kids' area that was pretty run-down and a miniature golf course that was probably the junkiest I've ever seen.

That said, it was a great place to take kids for a getaway from the Washington DC rat race.

Rachel wonders why the ball refuses to bounce off any of the walls at the Wintergreen miniature golf course.

Now I'm ready for a real ski trip, probably out west.

Jackson at the playground.

Emmet and Jackson get philosophical with each other at the playground.