High Points: Game faces

It’s the first week in December, and all anyone can talk about is how great the snow has been to start the ski season. In fact, you don’t even have to ask someone if they have hit the slopes — you can see it on their faces.

I was thinking about this at the end of the superb, sunny ski day this past Sunday around 4:30 p.m. as I walked the aisles of Whole Foods in Willits. Just about everybody in the market (which was just about out of food after the four-day holiday weekend) was wearing ski clothes and sporting exhausted, but satisfied, game faces. You could see it in their eyes — they had left everything out there on the mountain and had come downvalley to get a little sustenance before heading home to crash in their beds with powder dreams in their heads. Most of the folks in the store were sunbaked with raccoon eyes left over from their sunglasses or goggles.

Game faces come in many varieties, and all were prevalent in the line at the gondola last week following the big dump that came just in time to kick off the season. There were the near demented and obsessed looks on the unshaven mugs of the aging powder dogs who were at the head of the line ready to dominate the terrain. There were the confident and cocky game faces of the Aspen Mountain regulars who knew exactly where they were headed to find their solo stashes. After all, there are no friends on powder days. There were the nervous but excited game faces of the first-day skiers who were mentally going through the motions, trying to remember if they could make their turns in the deep stuff.

Each one of these skiers had their agenda. They were there to take advantage of some of the best early-season snow in recent memory and had the looks to prove it. One of my favorite things about waiting in line at the gondy is watching the faces of those, young and old, rich and poor, experienced and not-so-much-so as they wait to enter the gondola cars and head up to the top for their first runs of the year. They are so focused, and there is so much enthusiasm that it is contagious. Everybody feels it, and their faces show it.

Of course, the greatest skiing game face of all time is that of the man who celebrated his 105th birthday this past Monday: Klaus Obermeyer. No one has skied the mountains of Aspen for more days than Klaus, and every day he went to the slopes, he wore the same large grin as his game face. He has the most positive game face on the planet.

Don’t believe it? Take a look at hundreds of photos of him through the decades, and in just about every single one, you’ll see him with his perpetual smile. This week, on his birthday, The Aspen Times ran a story and published photos taken of Klaus from the time he was just three years old in the winter of 1922, to a more recent shot taken in 2019 when he was honored with a run — Klaus’ Way — on Buttermilk, named after him. That’s almost a century apart, and in both photos, you can tell by the look on his face that he is ready to seize the day. In the article, he says about skiing, “You are the center of your own universe. You are given all these choices and opportunities. Where to turn, how fast to go, how to enjoy it. You have a positive energy; you cannot fear or have negative energy.”  

Sage advice, indeed, from an all-time Aspen great. Keep your game face on.