A rant about downhill skiing.

[Pete J]

I got a nice glossy catalog of all these nice Vermont ski areas in the mail. As I was flipping through it, I came across an article about tree skiing.
The author was a pro! His one-sided account of the history of VT skiing, the growth and changes over the years has finally led to..... Surprise, tree skiing areas at all the resorts because that's what the public wants.
He completely glossed over the fact that the ski areas used to pull your lift ticket or worse, your season pass if you ever got caught skiing in the trees. They used to threaten to arrest people, etc. I used to love going out west to Utah and Colorado just to escape the New England militant attitude towards tree skiing. Out west, the area's embraced and encouraged it.
Now the Vermont areas are using it as a marketing tool. Kinda hypocritical if you ask me. There must be $$$$ invloved for them to pull a 180 like that.

OK, rant over.

[sprucebunny]

LogRite--I've wondered about that , too. Also something must have been settled on the insurance front.
 People are all nuts about wearing thier seatbelts on the way to go ski between trees.  ??? Does that make sense?

[Pete J]

The thing that might make sense about the seat belt thing is that you might be in control of your vehicle, but you never know what the other guy is going to do. With skiing, it's pretty much you vs. the trees.
Those wide open slopes with people cooking along at 40mph never used to concern me until I became a parent. Now I wonder how my 6 year old will feel with some punk wizzing by at speed while she's just putzing down the hill. I've heard too many stories about collisions to turn a blind eye to it. The trees keep everyones speed down because you are forced to go around them. To me, it's a no brainer. Hit a tree at 10mph or get taken out by a punk doing 40. I'll take the tree any day.