Lo-Fidelity: Run me out in the cold rain and snow

One could make a cogent argument this would’ve been an excellent week to leave town. 

Another might reckon staying here affords one a level of relaxation, solitude and splendid isolation reserved mostly for the ballyhooed, good-ol’ Halcion days of off-season. Sure, I could’ve easily loaded up my truck and gone to Moab, then onto Vegas, but I chose to stay. I’m glad I did because what I witnessed here in Aspen this week was truly uplifting. 

Ironic, in the sense that, generally, when it snows during off-season, the pain-index is sky high — whether that’s from old surgeries, sore joints and swelling due to barometric pressure or a general mental breakdown and despair I usually associate with the unspoken, grim, underbelly off-season. Everyone always says how much they “love off-season,” but when cabin fever sets in, it can also be challenging for some people, even deadly. 

Sunday morning served me chicken and waffles with a healthy side of family at the Hickory House, watching the big, downy pillow-fight flakes blanket Shadow Mountain. Next, a trip to the post office/market/hardware store industrial-complex, seeing only familiar faces at every turn, then home and straight back into bed to watch it snow. A perfect day. 

The gutters around town were working overtime, yet the atmosphere in town was that of a powder day. Drought’ll do that. I made the rookie mistake of leaving the house with a fleece jacket sans hood. My head was soaked within minutes. Mother Nature had me on the run. 

The mood in town was one of elation: We were getting significant precipitation; you’ve never witnessed people so happy to see sleet.  At the P-O, a sad-faced foreigner with a thick, tone-deaf accent gazed out the window and bemoaned, “Where’s my sunny day?” I very nearly lost my mind at the stranger but decided to save my precious ire for friends and family. 

Then something hit me. That morning, I’d been hearing a common theme among rational locals; people were repeatedly mentioning the “snow stakes” and “mountain cams” and how much snow was up there. There was an audible buzz. 

I hatched a mischievous idea. I was going to start a delicious off-season rumor — Ajax was re-opening for skiing — and see how many people would actually show-up to the bottom of the gondola on Monday. 

When I floated-out the nefarious fib, “Hey, did you hear, Ajax is re-opening tomorrow morning?” I actually got a couple of unsuspecting locals to bite. “Wait, what?!” one of them said. “I’ll be there if they do!” said another. “Cool,” mumbled a red-eyed dude who kept walking by with a couldn’t-care-less nonchalance of a librarian or a burnt-out bellman who’d just told his boss to “take this job and shove it.”  

I can think of at least two people (three, including me) who would’ve been there: Mikey and Scotty. I saw Scotty on closing day wearing a jacket adorned with all of his 100-day pins and 1,000-day medals on his jacket — he looked like a decorated war veteran. He then busted-out a metal ring with every single one of his season passes — a virtual Rolodex of ski-conquest. The pictures were absolutely priceless. In the old ones, Scotty was a dead-ringer for the drummer from Motörhead.  

Can you imagine the bewilderment of locals in various locales like Hawaii and Mexico, sprawled out on a lounger scrolling their socials, when they saw posts of people skiing powder on Ajax? Alas, Aspen Mountain never re-opened, but it probably could’ve. I imagine if you had the right wax, the skiing would’ve been good — for about an hour, right up until the point where sun hit the snowpack and the entire mountain turned into a Super Glue factory, the kind of conditions you can hear the ACL’s popping like popcorn.

When the clouds parted on Monday morning, I saw tracks, and lots of ’em. Powder-hungry locals were up there skiing. I felt pangs of jealousy, soon replaced by the reality of what it really takes to earn those turns — and the inherent risks involved, as clearly outlined in the fine print on the back of your old ski pass. 

I’m happy I hunkered in town and witnessed the undeniable feels of spring, like the multi-color camouflage of new green growth against a fresh fall of snow, the change in timbre of birdsong, newly-leafing trees groaning under the weight of water-rich snow and the primordial smells of fertile earth waiting to come alive once again. Spring to me is every bit as stunning as fall, perhaps even more so because of the trademark element of hope, transformation and re-awakening.