A Little Off the Top: Life's little lessons at Big Sky

As I sit here writing this column, my buns are sore, my ankles hurt, and my ego is shattered. I paid hundreds of dollars to experience this.

Many of you refer to this as a "ski trip."

A ski trip with friends! What could be more fun over the Christmas holiday? Yes, I must find something to do the other seven months out of the year when I'm not hitting $30 worth of golf balls into the water hazards.

Skiing and golf are two things that I took up recently, and they have many similarities; mainly, that I fork over hundreds of dollars to make an idiot of myself in front of other people.

But this was not my game plan last week when I set out for Big Sky, one of the state's premier ski resorts. Some friends had a place to stay, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to pick up where I left off about 10 years ago, the last time I went skiing.

The conditions were perfect. It was snowing when I arrived, and I would be surrounded by nurturing, supportive friends who would help me grow and develop into quite the dashing Nordic-skiing-Olympic-downhill-athlete-person that I envisioned myself becoming by week's end.

I arrived last Thursday afternoon, ready to hit the slopes the next morning.

"We have to leave here at 8:30 so we can get the kids to ski school on time," my friend told me.

Ski school! What a great idea. That's just what I needed to get off on the right track.

"If I sign up for ski school, too, am I going to be in the same class as your kids?" I asked, looking at her children, who ranged from about one to four.

"No, they have classes for adults, too," she said.

Pheeewwwww. At least I'll be with people my own age. If there's one thing I hate it's embarrassing myself in front of 4-year-olds, I thought.

I would later discover how much worse it was to make a horse's rear end of myself in front of people my own age.

The next morning, I found myself waiting at the appropriate spot for my class to begin. They make it really easy for you to find the right class by posting signs that say "Beginner, Level 1" so that everyone knows that whoever is standing next to that sign is a real chump.

I kind of positioned myself next to the "Intermediate" sign so I could look cool.

One thing I discovered immediately is that for a sport that requires agility, coordination and finesse with your feet, they sure do make it difficult from the get-go. The ski boots they make you wear feel like you have cement blocks on your feet. Now I know how Mafia victims feel.

But, all of us in our beginner class were all in the same, uncoordinated, unskilled boat. We had a great time learning the basics.

A truly gifted athlete will think nothing of paying hundreds of dollars to look like a moron in front of dozens of other accomplished athletes.

In the end, someone took out a camera and we all got our picture taken together.

"On three, everybody say 'Compound fracture,'" I said as the photo was taken.

"That's not funny," our instructor said.

Teachers always enjoyed having me in class.

And with that, I was ready to hit the slopes. Big Sky, like many resorts, has a section of trails for beginners, accessible by a "special" chair lift called the Explorer. The Explorer is really a euphemism for "a lift for crappy skiers because we don't want them skiing near the good people because the good skiers might end up getting hurt."

But if Big Sky called the Explorer that then the line to buy lift tickets would take forever. It might also hurt their marketing efforts.

The Explorer only takes you to "green" slopes. For those of you who aren't professional ski experts like I am, ski resorts divide slopes into green, blue and black according to level of difficulty. It also loosely correlates to the color of the bruise you get when you fall on that particular hill.

The Explorer is really slow. It's a lot slower than the other lifts because morons like me are always dropping their poles, having trouble actually sitting in the chair when it arrives, or forgetting to get out when you get to the top.

I discovered one of the hardest things about skiing is actually getting out of the lift. You're supposed to just let it kind of push you forward gently down the little hill, but I always arrived at the bottom of the hill in a slow skid, my skis up in the air, sliding down on my back. Much of my trip was spent lying on the ground, looking up at Ski Patrol people and instructors. They were really helpful.

While I was lying on the ground, I noticed a phenomenon unique to ski resorts — snow bunnies! They always seemed to be around whenever I fell.

Snow bunnies are young, single women who have nice ski outfits that are snug in all the right places, and they laugh at all your stupid jokes, and they like to snuggle up next to you and a roaring fire in the ski lodge later that evening, and they have bright beautiful smiles and a healthy glow on their cheeks from their days spent doing athletic stuff in the great outdoors, like hurtling themselves down a mountain.

At least, this is what I imagined they were like. I never really got a chance to find out because I found it difficult to talk to them while I was buried upside down, up to my waist in snow, my ankles twisted at an awkward angle, skis tangled up, with one pole stuck in my ear.

This was a position I found myself in all weekend. I got used to it.

I also learned a lot about skiing, too. I learned what a "yard sale" was. A yard sale is when you wipe out so badly that all your skis, gloves, helmet, goggles, boots and everything just go flying in different directions, scattered all over the slopes like the wreckage from an airplane crash. There's so much stuff lying everywhere that it looks, well, like a yard sale.

I had so many yard sales that by the end of the trip, little old ladies were showing up on my lawn at 7 a.m. to get the good stuff before the regular crowd arrived.

It was during one of my yard sales that I noticed it's not considered rude of the people on the chair lift above you to applaud your wipe-out. Here I am, lying on my back in the snow after yet another spectacular crash, and a half dozen snow bunnies would be clapping and cheering from about 30 feet above me, as they rode the lift to the harder slopes.

Snow bunnies don't hang out on the green slopes, I learned.

After a day of yard sales, I really, really had my hopes set on trying one of the blue slopes. I was ready. I could turn. I could stop. I could snowplow so well it looked like Moses parting the Red Sea. Besides, there were little kids going down the blue slopes, without using any poles. I'm talking 4-year-olds here.

"Do you think I'm ready for a blue trail?" I asked one of my friends.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because they're too steep."

That seemed to make sense. So I just resigned myself to having fun on the green slopes for the rest of my stay.

In the end, I had to yet again remind myself that I don't have to be the best at everything I try. This message really hit home as I slammed into a small fir tree on the side of the slope.

Sometimes, you just gotta be content being a green-slope kind of guy.

By the end of the week, I was skiing pretty well, with the skis almost parallel, most of the time, even when I fell. After that last run, I skied down to the hotel (ski in, ski out!), and did a nifty stop on a dime, throwing a little snow out like the pros do at the end of the Olympic run.

I knew I'd done pretty well that week when I watched a guy ski up to the hotel, fail to stop, and ski right onto the brick patio outside. Friction took over, and with no snow on the bricks, his skis came to an immediate stop, at which point he did a face-plant right in front of about a dozen snow bunnies.

I felt his pain. Clearly he could use some words of encouragement.

"Yard sale!" I yelled.