First chair, empty mountain

Nobody talks about the first twenty minutes after the lift opens on a powder day. The groomers are still intact. The untracked snow in the trees hasn’t been touched. The mountain is briefly returned to something it was before anyone got there.

You can hear the cold.

By 10am it’s gone — the runs chopped up, the lines forming, the runs renamed by collective memory into something social. But for those twenty minutes it’s just terrain and physics and whatever decision you make at the top of each pitch.

That’s the whole thing, actually. The rest is getting there.