Ski season starts with a movie. It’s the same thing every year—I take the family to see the annual release of the latest Warren Miller film, we watch the collection of short clips of skiers and snowboarders floating through neck-high powder, and like a little kid, I imagine myself up there on the screen, in the powder, doing back flips off cliffs as if I don’t have the knees and back of a 48 year old.
It’s a tradition, like hanging stockings over the chimney with care or getting a gym membership on January 1. It’s something we do to mark the season. And every year I come out of that movie pumped for the winter ahead, like a little kid watching Elf on Christmas Eve. The stoke is so high after these Warren Miller screenings that I walk out of the movie theater, turn to my kids and say, “This is gonna be the best winter ever.”
I mean it, too. I am generally a positive guy, and every year I’m convinced that the ski season in front of us is going to be the stuff of legends. I know in my heart that the powder will be so thick that folk singers will write songs about it.
And every year, I’m dead wrong. It’s not my stoke that waivers, it’s the snow. We just haven’t been getting much of it in recent winters. You can blame global warming or you can blame the secret society that controls the weather. Either way, we’re not getting the powder we need to have the Best Winter Ever. At least, not here in the Southern Appalachians.
I remember the actual best winter ever. It was 2009/2010. My kids turned one that year. They still had that new baby smell and were greeted by a world with a near-constant blanket of snow. It’s possible that I’m wrong here, but the way I remember that winter is that it snowed just about every Friday for several weeks in a row. I remember skiing tree lines off the side of the Appalachian Trail above 5,000 feet. I remember carving elaborate luge runs in the neighborhood park and taking my tiny kids sledding, holding them carefully in my lap while their mom worried about potential brain damage. I remember cross country skiing narrow mountain bike trails in Pisgah National Forest. It snowed so much in town a couple of times that winter, that I remember strapping on my skinny skis and skinning to the bars in downtown, where good-natured snowball fights broke out between strangers in the middle of the street.
There was no political angst that winter. No ideological tension or rifts between family members…there was too much snow for that sort of silliness. Was there world peace? Did enemies drop their arms and hold hands across the globe? Probably. Fresh powder puts everything in perspective.
Best. Winter. Ever.
So what’s happened since that epic 09/10 winter? Mostly meh conditions. We’ve had some snow, don’t get me wrong, and the majority of the resorts here in the South do a bang-up job creating and managing skiable conditions without much help from Mother Nature, so we’ve had good ski seasons. I’m eternally grateful for the person who invented the snow gun. It was probably a mom who was sick of listening to her kids complain that there wasn’t enough snow to go sledding.
But have we had the Best. Winter. Ever? Not even close. And yet, contrary to all the evidence that stacked up against me, I still say it. I still see that Warren Miller movie and I still get stoked and I still come out of the theater thinking this will be the best winter ever.
What’s it called when you do the exact same thing over and over but expect a different outcome?
Optimism. That’s what it’s called. Optimism.
So here I am again, convinced that this winter, 2024/2025, is going to be the Best Winter Ever. Never mind the fact that I recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal about how this past fall was unusually warm. Pay no attention to the fact that it’s mid-November as I write this and I’m wearing a t-shirt and looking forward to a mountain bike ride with the temps in the low 60s. None of this matters. I’m going to bring so much stoke to this ski season that Mother Nature will have no choice but to unleash a fury of powder on my head.
And this year, I actually have a tangible, somewhat logical reason to be so stoked, because my home mountain, the resort that I have dubbed Breckenwolf, has undergone massive renovations after a change in ownership. This is the same mountain that gave birth to the phenomenon known as Whiskey Wednesday, where adults with bad backs act like teenagers every week. This is the same mountain where I taught my kids how to ski, explaining to them the importance of spotting people from Florida, and avoiding those people on the slopes. This is the same mountain where I, too, took some of my first turns as a youth, still struggling to move from pizza to French fry.
The new owners have invested millions, completely revamping the facilities, and Breckenwolf has new snow guns, new pipes to carry water to those snow guns, a brand-new lodge. Rumor has it there will be new ski runs, even a terrain park with its own tow rope. Rumor also has it that the new management will actually blow snow on those ski runs, which will be a massive upgrade from previous winters.
I haven’t set foot on the revitalized property in person yet, but the photos and videos I’ve seen are enough to get me excited. Basically, we have a new ski resort to explore here in the Southern Appalachians. Between that new development and the latest Warren Miller flick, how could you not be stoked?
Best. Winter. Ever.
Cover photo: Photo courtesy of the author
