Three matching skis

Our last day in Vail the snow was outstanding. We were about halfway through the day, riding up the slow chair in one of the back bowls, when Dad remarked that he thought it was probably the best snow we had ever had for one of our ski trips. It had snowed overnight and in some places there was as much as a foot of light fluffy powder.

We had gone so far as joking about wearing matching pink ski suits emblazoned with the motto "Powder Sucks!" in order to deter less experienced skiers from tracking up the best part of the mountain with their snowplows. Evan was irritated by a man who was doing just that—and who had the gall to complain about the powder being too deep.

Unfortunately, a good portion of the fun was about to come to an end. Halfway down that run through the glorious snow, I was bringing up the rear when I passed through a little gully and my right ski tip plunged downward into the snow, stopping it short. My boot popped out of its binding and, with just one ski left, I crashed and came to a stop on just one ski a bit downhill of the mishap.

Dad and Evan were waiting a couple hundred yards down the mountain while I composed myself and looked back uphill for my ski. I started walking back up the hill, but didn't see it. Soon, a man stopped below me and asked if I was okay. I told him I had lost a ski. A woman stopped above me and said that my ski was straight ahead of me up the hill, about six feet away. I climbed up a little farther, but failed to see what she was talking about. She repeated that it was ahead of me. By the time I got to the spot I thought she meant, she had gone on, and my ski was still nowhere to be seen.

I searched around in vain whacking the powder with my ski poles hoping to discover my submerged ski just under the surface. Soon, a member of the Ski Patrol arrived. He suggested scraping away the top layer of snow with my remaining ski, and meanwhile radioed for a loaner. Someone else had lost a ski just a hundred yards above us, so another member of the patrol brought two skis, and dropped one off on her way to me. The pair of them fitted the new ski to my boot, and I was good to go.

Curiously, this new ski was the same model as the ones Dad was using, a K2 Omni. I was skiing Salomon XScreams, and my left ski was now about 10 centimeters longer than my right. While both were red, white, and blue, they otherwise looked nothing alike, and I felt pretty silly for a while.

I proceeded down to where Dad was waiting. Evan had left to ride the chair back up again and meet us from above. When he arrived, we headed back down to the chair and made our way in a circle to the location of the accident, hoping to put our heads together and dig up the lost ski.

We tried several methods working over a large patch of slope in the vicinity of my fall, but to no avail. In all, we probably spent at least an hour and a half on that part of the mountain. I was not in a very good mood for a while. It didn't help that when we stopped for lunch, there were no available seats in the lodge because diners had largely decided to chat rather than head back into the cold. We had to sit on a bench in the stairwell.

After lunch, the mood brightened a bit, as the skiing was still outstanding, despite the tracked up runs. I even got used to using odd-sized skis. At the end of the day, I delivered my loaner to Lost & Found.

We were anticipating a hefty fine from the rental outfit for losing their ski when we got back to Denver. But because it was several years old, they only charged us thirty-five dollars. We were expecting a hundred or two. When we got back to the car, we joked that if we had known it would be so little, we wouldn't have bothered looking for it.