Tag Archives: Skiing

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The Local Hill

972bda288a6333b6c48ee41b975ddcb8972bda288a6333b6c48ee41b975ddcb8 A lot of people ask me why I ski at our local hill when I have the opportunity to ski all over the country. I tell them that I can’t be out west or in New England every week or weekend. You have to work,972bda288a6333b6c48ee41b975ddcb8 you know. So why would I just sit around on a Saturday morning and watch Sponge Bob Square Pants on the tube? Let’s have some love for the local ski hill!! Take Doug Shaffer for instance. Doug is a friend of mine who I ski with every weekend we are in town. Doug loves to ski like I do and spent a lot of time and money on ski camps with the Mahre twins when he was younger. His passion led to really good technique honed out west but also a lot of runs on the weekends at our home area of Seven Springs Mountain Resort here in Western Pa. We get together with our posse every Saturday morning consisting of Porter and Monty Scott, John McWilliams, the Edsons, Craig Morris and a host of others. We have a blast making turns and telling each other how good we were back “in the day.” Delusional but funny!

I skied not too long ago with Matt Ross in the rain up at Seven Springs. I don’t ever let the weather spoil my fun- you have to have the gear man!!! After a morning running the high speed lift, Matt remarked,” Pat- we just skied 26,000 vertical feet. That is like skiing from the summit of Mt. Everest to sea level.” Amazing! At our little area with some effort. Take a look at this crew in the picture above. This shows Jace Pasquale and Mike Andres in the black coaches uniforms surrounding masters racer Ken Fedorek. Jace was a fomer Women’s Pro Racer and Mike is a national class masters racer as well as the NASTAR pacesetter at Seven Springs. NASTAR is the recreational race program and the folks who feverishly race each other each weekend at Seven Springs call themselves Nastonians. They have a great time running the courses on their fiefdom of Nastonia which is 800 vertical feet of ski racing fun on the backside of our local mountain. Guys like masters racer extraodinaire Tim Sweeney buy skis expecially for the NASTAR courses. Check out their web site-www.nastonia.com All hail Nastonia!!!

A lot of world class racers developed their technique on little hills. Erich Sailer, a renowned Austrian coach runs an excellent race program at Buck Hill up in Minnesota. He has worked with Lindsey Vonn, Cindy Nelson and a host of other US Ski Team members at Buck Hill with repeated work through slalom and giant slalom training on a hill smaller than we have here in Western Pa. The same can be said about Cochran’s in Vermont. The Cochran family has many members that that were former Olympians and World Cup skiers. Cochran’s was developed by the father Mickey Cochran who lovingly put a lot of work into a family ski hill that became a prominent local hill for ski race training. My friend Eric Durfee said that while growing up in Vermont, Mickey would ask him and other junior racers to come to the hill in the fall and help pick rocks from the course to prepare for the winter training. This local maintenance was expected of all budding junior racers as well as adults who skied at Cochran’ with regularity. A great tradition with great pride formed with the local ski hill.

So the message here is don’t pooh pooh your local hill. You like to ski right? You want to get ready for your trip/trips-right? Then get out there and do it on your local hill. Hey Colorado- give Eldora some love!! You can avoid the traffic on I-70 and at the end of the day cruise down the Boulder Canyon Road and have a beer and a burger in Boulder. Hey Charlottesville,Va.- check out Wintergreen. Hey Minneapolis, St. Paul- go to Buck Hill soon!! Even you guys and gals out in Tahoe, when the lifts are on wind hold at the bigger areas, go ski Diamond Peak. A “gem” of an area with great slopes and trails for cheap!!! Sponge Bob and Patrick would be proud of your effort. Thanks for reading.

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From the Best of Chronicles of McCloskey

Characters

2013-02-05-the-bowl2013-02-05-the-bowl2013-02-05-the-bowl When you are like I am, and you have a habit of engaging in adrenaline fueled fun, you collect a number of friends along the way who are, for lack of a better word ,”characters.” I always talk about grabbing life by the horns and enjoying all that life has to offer. Well a lot of my friends take that rather literally. Bart Raitano,my skiing phenom friend in Vail who has a knee replacement and skis like a 30 year old is a good example. I have told you about my friend Mike Smith the pilot, skydiver, skier from Lake George who always has the gas pedal to the floor. But to illustrate the word “character” I would like to tell you the story of three of these friends who define the word. My friend Eric Durfee used to laugh when I would bring these guys up to New England and he would say,” Pat- where do you find these guys?” Oh, I found them and here are their stories.

Rich Monti, a dentist friend, broke his back skiing at Boyce Park which is a pimple of a hill outside of Pittsburgh. How you break your back there is a mystery, but this wild man somehow did it and resumed his skiing life with me at …..Tuckerman Ravine. The picture above shows the Ravine up in New Hampshire which I spoke about in an early post. It is a rather daunting place where you hike to ski. Monti wanted to accompany me there one year. Fast forward- we are all sitting at “Lunch Rocks” which is where everybody drinks their beer and eats their sandwiches that they haul in their packs. This is also the heckling place for everyone who watches the thrills and spills taking place on the gulleys and headwall of the Ravine. Undaunted, Rich gets into his skis and gradually traverses the face of the bowl and picks up speed along the way. His skis are wavering due to his maiden voyage after his injury and the adrenaline of the event fills Rich as he sails towards the pucker brush and rocks on the opposite side of the Ravine. The crowd starts to cheer him on as he begins to show signs of an impending, spectacular crash. True to form, he hits the puckerbrush at full speed, and all we see are his skis rocketing to the sky and a whiteout of snow in the distance. Silence pervades until we all see him stand up and give a two fisted salute of victory. The crowd went wild!! Rich walked back to the rocks and never put the skis on again on that trip. Broken back to Tuckerman Ravine traverse at full speed. I am proud to have him as my friend.

We did a bike race up at Mt. Washington,NH one year called appropriately “The Mt. Washington Hill Climb”. It begins at the Auto Road entrance at the bottom of the mountain in temperate conditions. When you reach the halfway mark of the climb, the temperatures are usually in the 40s with low visibility, and when you finally reach the summit of the auto road, it is upper 30s and often sleeting or snowing. Crazy weather up there. My friend Jack McArdle did it with me and I casually asked him about his climb after we had finished. As he took off his clothes in delirium at the summit, he revealed Superman briefs to the crowd with the “S” showing proudly right in front of the briefs. He told us how thirsty he was on the climb and how he found water. He simply dipped his water bottle into the split 55 gallon drums on the side of the road which collected rain water for overheated radiators for cars ascending the auto road. All the spectators at the summit were flabbergasted not only at the casual revelation of the Superman briefs, but how he could survive the climb drinking the filthy water collected in the barrels. Jack took it all in stride and never was worse for the wear on the ride back down in the van. Jack is an adventurer and I am pround to say he is my friend.

Finally there is Michael Dunlay. I met Mike through my wife Janet.They were Penn State friends. He played on the 1982 championship football team and is the guy carrying Joe Paterno on the famous Sports Illustrated cover commemorating the victory. Mike is a character. He owns 7 restaurants in Chicago. If you are there, check out his flagship restaurant http://www.dunlaysonclark.com and experience not only good food and drink but experience “The Dunz.” My memories of the Dunz came on PSU alumni ski trips where he would tirelessly cook for all of Janet’s girlfriends and their husbands. He would sling English muffins 20 at a time and line them up putting eggs, bacon and cheese on all of them and scream at the top of his lungs for all of us to get in there and eat!!! He was and is today high energy. One day while we were skiing, he rocketed over a ledge with his 210 Atomic GS skis and all we saw was a white cloud of snow, a vertical ski flying through the air. Again, silence pervaded until we all saw Dunz’s outstretched arms with a champagne bottle in tact in his cold large hand. On a related side outing to Killington to ski with my friend Eric Durfee and his ski racing phenom of a son Travis, Dunz showed up with wrap around sunglasses, a gaudy ski jacket and Cincinnati Bengal billowing pants. As he raced down the runs with the Durfees and me, he would start to brake about 500 yards from the lift. He is a big guy and carries a lot of momentum on the 210 GS skis. We all remarked how we have to stay real clear of the Dunz as he rockets down the hill and defintely do not want to be in his way during the braking phase of the runs. Everyone thought he was a professional football player and the Durfees again remarked,” Pat- where do you find these people?” Dunz eventually ripped those pants on a crash and threw them into a chairlift tower. He skied the rest of the day in his long underwear with his red hair flapping in the breeze and the wrap around sunglasses reflecting not only the sun but hiding the wild look in the Dunz’s eye as he tried to beat the national class ski racer down the hill. A hilarious sight -fast smooth racer turns followed by a roaring freight train of a man trying to keep up. Eric and I observed that this guy is quite the character. I am proud to have him as my friend.

Cherish your friends. The wilder they are, most likely the more passionate they are not only in life, but in their loyalty and love to you. These guys among others, may not have all the oars in the water, but they sure are fun and hopefully they are saying the same about me.  Thanks for reading!

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The PSIA Exam

IMGP0205 A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I decided that I would pursue being a ski instructor. I was in college and began to work part time for 3 guys who started a traveling ski school called The Ski Academy. We taught the prep school kids whom I really enjoyed teasing about the big silver spoon stuck in their mouths. Larry Cohen( a former Vail instructor), Chip Kamin( an examiner for PSIA in the Central Division), and Bob Irish( a legendary Maine ski racer) got me involved and encouraged me to join the Professional Ski Instructors of America. I signed up for the entry level registered event at Cannan Valley in West Virginia. After a long, snowy, and windy trip along the back roads of WVA, I made it to the event and completed it. This was the first step of my path towards certification with the PSIA( the governing body of professional ski instructors in this country.)

Fast forward, after I graduated from college, I wanted to pursue full certification. In those days, you had to have taken the registration clinic and then have 100 hours of teaching under your belt before you could consider taking the exam. You had to have a recommendation which I received from Larry, Bob and Chip and after my winter of teaching skiing at Sugarloaf in Kingfield,Maine, I made my way to Killington, Vermont for the exam. Prior to my year at Sugarloaf, I had taken other clinics to prepare. It was at these clincs that I met legendary figures in the world of ski instruction. Cal Cantrell, Ralph “Woody” Woodward, Sears Raymond, Bruce Fenn( how about that one from the past Hutch?)all worked with me and I learned of their notoriety as early PSIA members and founders along with their extensive years of coaching and skiing. The exam in those days was one week of written testing, skiing and teaching and my pre course conductors were Stu Campbell, the noted instructor from Stowe,Vermont and Ski Magazine contributor. The other was Peter Duke who was a real perfectionist and insisted on quality demonstrations and teaching ability. Peter went on to found Smart Wool and today is president of Point 6 the leader in quality athletic wool footwear. Peter and Stu were affiliated at the time with the Stowe, Vermont Ski School. It seemed as if anybody who was anybody in the 70s was from Stowe.

I will never forget the exam as long as I live. Three days of pre clinics and training with instructors from all over the East. The first day of written and teaching was held in the rain and the fog. I did my best to be enthusiastic even though my examiner Bill Tate threw me a curve ball by asking me to teach a lower level lesson on terrain that was too steep for the lesson. I was able to get the group down to an easier area with some sideslipping and a lot of humor and continued the lesson on the proper terrain. This tactic proved positive in my marks. The next day, the rain soaked snow turned to rock hard ice as the temperatures dropped severely and we had to take the skiing part of the exam on the Cascade Run at Killington on bullet proof conditions. The un-nerving thing is that 3 examiners stand at 3 different places on the side of the run and check to see if you are truly carving a turn and using your skis as they are designed to be skied. I did a reasonable job whereas some people in my group made a series of linked recoveries down the hill much to the dismay of the examiners.

Finally, when it came to the presentations of the coveted PSIA gold pins, a list went up on the wall of the lodge and you could see people dropping like flies as their numbers were not posted. They were dejected and walked silently out of the room while those of us who passed let out a big sigh of relief when we saw our number posted. The pin presentation was a proud moment for me which has meant something to me all of my life up to this day. I continue to take the required bi-annual update to keep the certification current and in 2007, I received my 30 year pin and a nice letter from the national president of PSIA. It is hanging on the Wall of Fame in my basement today as a reminder of the fun times I had as a ski instructor.

The test today is a three part exam and very time consuming and difficult to pass. One has to spend time teaching and skiing on a big mountain like I did as a 21 year old lad, but the confidence and the pride you feel after passing the exams and getting that pin cannot be matched by any other certification process. The picture you see above is my friend Mark Hutchinson and me together at Mammoth on our annual ski trip. I met Mark later in life but interestingly, he and I passed the test together at Killington at that same exam. Mark was a former race coach at Stowe( here we go again with the Stowe guys), and currently lives in Vermont. We have a lot of fun skiing together at Killington and reliving the old days. We talk about the legends and laugh. We will be together in a few weeks again at Mammoth with our Durfee posse and will relive those old days again and again.

As I close this post, I wanted to tell you that I am writing this for my friend Art Bonavoglia who is currently teaching at Vail and is 60 years young. Art is one hell of an athlete and a great skier and is contemplating taking the exam out west. Art- go for it! I know everyone reading the blog will encourage you to take that exam. You are on one of the best mountains in the country working for arguably the best ski school in the world. Take the exam Art and you will be glad that you did it. I certainly am glad that I took it although I am grandfathered in as a level three because of the one week requirement in the old days. But…………..I will take it. My pin will be as shiny as yours Art. Thanks for reading.

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The Family Ski Trip

photophoto You know, when you ski by yourself, you pretty much have things dialed in. Skis, boots, poles, socks, long undies, sweater, pants, parka, helmet, gloves, goggles. Pretty much from the ground up. No problem. But now, you decide, its time to get the family to start skiing. So, you decide well…….lets start local and maybe rent. So you piece some clothes together, throw everybody in the car, hit the rental place, get everybody outfitted and get lift tickets. Yikes!!! You have cleaned out your wallet and put a dent in the credit card and you have not even started to ski yet. Fast forward, you either soldier it out and teach the kids yourself with your wife, assuming she skis ( should have been one of the pre-nuptual requirements) or…..you throw the kids in ski school and again assault your credit cards or wallet or both. Now its time to feed everybody at lunch, ski a little more, figure out who is whining and who is not and divide and conquer. The ones who are done, they are in the lodge waiting with one or the other spouse. The rest are killing themselves until the last moment. Return the equipment, start the car, hit the Arches, and get the tired crying kids to bed and nudge your wife in the front seat that it is time to go in the house. This is the first day. Did everyone have fun? Lets hope so!!!!!

Fast forward again- now you decide……….Road Trip. For those of us in the East, that means either Western New York or New England. Maybe this time, you have hit the ski swaps, everybody has their stuff, and you start to get organized and pack the car. You have settled on a place to stay at the ski area and decided when to depart for the long trip in the car. You get about 10 miles out and yes, someone forgot their helmet. Somebody else forgot their gloves or they left them on top of the car. You wife forgot her cell phone. You go back, get what you can, do a re-check and now you are an hour later than planned. Maybe the weather has granted you a special treat and it starts to snow and the roads are getting hairy. Now the drive is an extra challenge with someone in the back seat sitting on a peanut butter sandwich and getting mad at the other one for putting it there. You arrive, schlepp( the wonderful Yiddish word for grunting everything into the house), and you slave until all are settled and ready to ski the next day. Breakfast, lift tickets, everybody on the lift together, no fighting, some are cold, some are not, the days are like keeping lids on boiling pots. But the smiles and the beauty of the mountains somehow relieves the utter exhaustion that has set over the lovely couple who has decided to take the family on a road/ski trip. Great times, long drives, pizza, end of the day beers for the adults, lost accessories, visits to the ski shops to replace, and hopefully no injuries. End of the weekend or the week, back in the car, long drive back, schlepp all the stuff back in the house…………..did you have fun? The skiing was great, the kids did well, but we are broke and trashed. It will take a week to recover.

Now look at the picture above. The real veterans. My friend Daryl Hasley took the picture of his lovely wife and really neat kids. They ski, they snowboard, but Daryl and fam have definitely paid their dues with local, road and now the biggie- ski the west with the family. Now the Hasleys piece together frequent flyers, rental car deals, on-line lift tickets, great deal on a condo in Steamboat,Colorado, shop and eat in with the kids. The veterans know the deal. They know to get to the airport with plenty of time. They do the check list on equipment, clothes, and accessories. They bring extra. They have it dialed in and the family loves the trip, loves the environment, and the parents have pictures like this to remember and treasure for years to come as the kids grow to adults. “Hey dad, remember that great trip to Steamboat when we were kids?” Yea- those statements are like gold to an aging parent. All the schlepping, money, time, patience, spent on the family ski trip was well worth the supreme hassle -right? Absolutely!!!! Smiles galore for years to come. Pictures on the wall of fame in the basement. Hopefully the kids will do the same thing for their kids someday and maybe the grandparents can tag along? Skiing is a pain in the butt. It is cold, you are like a Sherpa hauling all the gear, tears, fighting, fatigue, food fights, etc. But in the end…….worth it all and the memories will last a lifetime. Sure it is a pain and it is expensive. But can you ever replace those times in the condo or the car? The conversations, the laughs, the tears. Ski trips are great family trips. If you get the chance, take one. If you do it regularly, do it again. Time flies and the snow doesn’t always last. Thanks for reading.