Always Making Memories

My family is not my family without skiing… maybe it’s because my sister and I were learning to ski while other kids were learning to ride a bike. Or that when my parents were growing up, they cross-country skied to class every day in weather deemed “school cancelable” by most people. To us, skiing was never a sport or activity, it was a way of life.

When I was a kid, there was nothing more exciting for my sister and I than waking up early on a cold winter day to pack our ski gear into the car for a long weekend at the condo. By the time we got in the car, we had it all planned out: Wake up early, ski, ice skate, swim in the heated pool, and finally sip hot cocoa by the fire and watch cartoons. In our minds, skiing encompassed the whole experience, and we knew exactly how to make the most of it.

As the lifts opened, we were there, struggling to get our stiff, cold boots on our tiny feet and proceeding to stumble towards the lift line. We were never graceful about it, but we knew exactly what we wanted to do. Once we were at the top, we always took in the sights and sound of the mountain as we practiced our turns and tricks. A little friendly competition was never out of the question either.

At the end of the day, skiing was always a simple pleasure for us because it reminded us of who we were and where we came from…

Sixteen years later, and we find ourselves too busy to go on family ski trips. Bogged down with daily routines and formalities, we’re always cursed with the, “there’s always next year” mentality.

For several years, I gave up skiing until I heard about a trip that the CSU Outdoor Club was going to take to Utah. My skis were several inches too small and I was out of shape for skiing, but I had nothing to lose.

As I took the long six-hour drive to Salt Lake, and up the winding roads of Big Cottonwood Canyon, the jittery excitement of being a kid during Colorado’s snowiest winter days came back to me.

Bear Trap Lodge turned out to be a pretty small cabin and I wasn’t sure if it could accommodate 30 college kids. But sure enough, we settled in nicely, and we were all able to pitch out our place to sleep on the ground, bed, attic, or hearth.

The trip was more or less planned out by each individual, and on a day-by-day basis, so we didn’t have a group schedule weighing us down. There were a lot of people driving, and a lot of mountains to hit, so people who didn’t have a car were able to carpool to get to the mountain they were skiing that day.

Half way through the trip, a huge snowstorm hit in our area and I woke up to a cabin full of ecstatic college students. By this time everyone had discovered their favorite mountain, so everyone was hastily exchanging lift passes and dragging themselves out the door to get an early start on the powder day.

Wes agreed to drive Bryce and I since he was headed to Snowbird too, so we packed up our skis and boots and made our way down the canyon in his tiny Prius. I didn’t feel safe being in a Prius on the unplowed winter roads, but we made it there with time to spare in order to catch the first gondola to the top.

At the peak, the view and atmosphere were surreal. The sun was rising over the neighboring peak as flurries of snow drifted off the steep cliffs towards the undetectable ground below. All the while I couldn’t stop wondering…

“how did I get here?”

Every scientific law that went into creating and maintaining the earth as we know it had to be in place at that moment for me to experience it and capture it as a memory. It’s nothing short of a miracle that something so meaningful can come out of something that is seemingly meaningless in the vastness of the universe. The best part of all is that I didn’t experience it alone. I had friends with me who captured the same memory, and understood the same miracle that took place that day to allow us to do what we love in life.

I will continue to look forward to the day my whole family skis together once again. Until then, I will choose to live my life like when I was a kid: Always making memories, and never forgetting where I came from.