I am 6 years old standing at the top of Ruby Hill, Denver’s best sledding hill. The hill is filled with children, teenagers, and parents and a red winter coat streaks down the hill every few seconds. My dad stands at the bottom with his fingers curled over the top of one of those camcorders with the screen that folded out on the side. My fingers curl around the yellow cord attached to an orange, plastic sled sitting atop the snow. “Go! You got it!” my dad yells to me up the hill. I look down towards the children walking up dragging their sleds after a successful ride down the hill and I decide to wait. I imagine veering off course and hitting them, taking out their legs, and only being able to say, “Sorry!” The camcorder starts to fill up, not with fun family videos, but a video that was likely deleted, because James was anxious about going down the busy hill and hitting another kid with his sled.
I am 15 years old and my shoulder starts to hurt from the weight of the skis that I am borrowing from a friend for the weekend. My goggles are fogging up from the heat of my breath as I trudge up the ridge above the Highlands Bowl in Aspen. I am going at the same pace as guys with HIKE MODE on their boots and special backpacks to carry their skis on their backs, so I don’t feel so bad. As I approach the top, I can hear the snapping of the prayer flags in the wind and finally I see their reds, yellows, and greens light up by the sun among a sky of blue and snow-covered mountains. I could have gone further, I think when I make it to the top, but I dump my skis onto the ground, my shoulder yawning in relief, and walk to the edge of the summit to admire the view. My friends and I take a few obligatory photos together. Then we click our heels into our skis and drop down into the bowl.
I turn 20 years old next week, my friends and I are playing jokes on each other in the lift line. We are cautious to make sure our masks cover our noses, lest one of the lift operators clip our pass. The entire lift up is an endless stream of laughter and quick stories about last semester’s experience. The sun is shining and you can smell the mountain air, crisp, dry, and clean. I grew up playing hockey, so I spent many more hours freezing in the rink than on the mountain with skis on my feet, unlike many of my friends. Now, I had set one goal for the winter break of my sophomore year at Brown, “I want to ski so many days,” intentionally arbitrary because I didn’t want to feel bummed about missing my goal, but I still wanted to be excited for spontaneous ski days, I knew I could get more days than I had ever skied any year of my life. The mountain is our playground. We chart the mountain with our ski tracks riding every lift open in search of the best snow and most fun runs. By the afternoon, we’ve discovered our favorite runs and we lap the lift that takes us to them, same lift and same runs over and over, slightly different paths each time. Atop the snow in Colorado, I have discovered my happy place.
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