Winter blunderland
On a sunny March afternoon last year, I took my 20-year-old niece Francesca for a little Nordic ski outing south of Lake Tahoe. Fran had never before put on a pair of skis, cross-country or otherwise, but she took to it like a duck to (frozen) water.
“How often do you do this?” she asked me. We live a mere 30 minutes from Hope Valley, one of the prettiest spots in the Sierra, so you’d expect we’d pop up there frequently from the Carson Valley, if only to Instagram enviable pictures of our new, post-Cali lifestyle.
“Oh, about once every twenty five years,” I replied.
My personal boycott of Nordic skiing, established long before I’d actually moved to the ridiculously beautiful Eastern Sierra, had just ended without fanfare in this pleasant meadow.
Practically speaking, it’s just too hard to hold a grudge that long.
It always gives me pause to tell a young person about stupid stuff I’ve done as an adult. Then I remind myself that the interwebs have perfected the sharing of stupid human tricks. As a role model, I can probably breathe easy.
And what is it about winter in the Sierra Nevada that encourages stupidity? From the Donner Party to big air, there was, and is, more than enough of it to go around.
