'Loafin'

In the past few years, I've been fortunate enough to accompany my sister's family on several ski trips out west - to places like Breckenridge Colorado, Park City, Utah, Tahoe, Nevada, and Steamboat Springs, Colorado. And while the snow conditions haven't always been ideal, it has been fun to experience the various micro-cultures offered by the resorts and surrounding towns in these ski meccas.

Unfortunately, through all of this globe hopping, I have neglected visiting the ski areas that are, in comparison, in my own backyard. Maine has a variety of ski areas, of various sizes, spread throughout the state. The "big two," however, in terms of skiable terrain, number of lifts, and number of visitors, are Sunday River and Sugarloaf.

Among skiers, you will find a deeply divided rift as to what area, Sunday River or Sugarloaf, offers the better ski experience. Get a few partisan Sunday River skiers together with a few partisan Sugarloaf skiers, and you are likely to be privy to a spirited discourse every bit as fervent as that between gun control advocates and gun rights advocates. In the good old days, the resorts themselves used to contribute to this verbal jostling match with radio commercials that took not-so-subtle swipes at the rival resort. All that changed a few years back, however, when the American Skiing Company, which owns Sunday River, purchased Sugarloaf as well. The two resorts still pretty much maintain their separate identities, but corporate cooperation has replaced rivalry as their underlying public relations strategy.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to get re-aquainted with my favorite of the two resorts, Sugarloaf (a.k.a. "The Loaf"). My brother-in-law decided that he needed a minimum-hassle getaway without the wife and kids, and I was more than happy to serve as a partner in crime for three days of skiing and whatever else we could scrape up. A hint for anyone contemplating doing the same - check out www.sugarloaf.com for low-cost ski and stay packages that you can't find through travel agents or even by booking over the telephone.

As far as the weather goes, our timing could not have been better. We arrived on a Wednesday night, and the area got a foot of new snow only a few days earlier. After a near snowless December, January and February saw nearly seven feet of snow dumped on the mountain, so pretty much all of the terrain was open and skiable.

Two of the things you always hear about skiing in the east is that it is a lot colder than in the west, and the runs are a lot icier. In my opinion, I think that it is foolish to even attempt to generalize. When I was in Park City, only about 25 percent of the runs were open because of lack of snow, and ice was certainly evident on many of the runs. In Breckenridge, 15 below at night was the norm, and it seldom climbed above single digits during the day. The weather is too unpredictable these days to go anywhere and expect a "normal" weather experience. You just have to hope for the best and take whatever comes your way.

On this particular Thursday morning, what came our way was plenty of snow, below zero temperatures, and a vicious wind. Yes, it was cold. So cold, in fact, that the only prudent thing to do after the first run down was to head for the lodge to purchase a face mask. It wasn't going to be an ideal day, weather-wise, but we were going to have to deal with it anyway, so we might as well make ourselves as comfortable as possible.

The masks did the trick, except for the occasional "leaks" where a bit of skin somehow became exposed during a run down. Keeping covered, along with regularly scheduled "lodge breaks" proved to be an effective strategy for getting in plenty of skiing without acquiring a pesky case of frostbite.

One of the distinct advantages that Sugarloaf has over Sunday River is it's remote location. Whereas Sunday River attracts the Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York crowds, Sugarloaf is a good hour and a half further north, which helps to limit the amount of ski pests. On Thursday and Friday, we didn't exactly have the slopes to ourselves, but we never had to stand in a lift line. Saturday was a bit different, seeing that it was the start of the President's Day vacation week, but even then it was no doubt far less crowded than other New England ski areas. My brother-in-law does not believe in getting off the slopes until the lifts stop running and four in the afternoon, so, as you might imagine, with no lift lines you get a heck of a lot of skiing in in the course of seven hours. Suffice it to say that by the end of the third day, my body was rather happy that there would be no fourth day of skiing.

I fancy myself as being a pretty good skier, having been doing it pretty steady for the last 25 years. After all that time, one would think that I would have also mastered the art of riding a lift. However, I proved to be anything but a "master" on this trip. The trouble started when went from riding a high-speed detatchable-quad chairlift (cushy, indeed) to a standard, run-of-the mill two-seat chair lift. The detatchable-quad chairlift gets it's name from the fact that the chair detaches from the cable at the loading and unloading station and slows to a crawl so that skiers can comfortably get on and off. On your standard chair lifts, there is no such change in chair velocity. I re-learned this fact the hard way the first time I attempted to board the double-chair. We diligently skied up to the loading area and I prepared to turn my head to watch for the approaching chair. That was the plan, anyway. Turns out the chairlift had other ideas and decided to smack me square in the back of the head before I even had a chance to turn. The bottom of the chair, of course, then bashed me in the back of the legs and then scooped me up for a rather painful ride up the mountain. It is times like these that I question the rationale of paying for this "fun."

Unfortunately, that wasn't the worst of my lift-riding experiences. On very windy days like it was on this day, Sugarloaf, for safety reasons, closes the lifts that run to the top of the mountain. On days such as these, the only way you can get near the upper terrain is to ride a T-bar, which runs close to the ground so it isn't subject to the whims of the heavy winds. For those of you not familiar with such a device, a T-bar is basically a long metal pole that extends down from a cable and has a narrow "T" seat on the end. You don't sit on the seat, but, rather, lean it up against your butt and let the bar drag you up the hill.

I have found, however, that if you happen to be wearing somewhat slick Goretex pants, the seat does not exactly want to stay in your butt area. Instead, it wants to slide up your back and over your head, leaving you to grab on desperately with your arms while trying to remain upright on your skis. The result is a rather awkward ride up the mountain in which your arms scream in pain while being pulled out of their sockets. I'm proud to say that I made it almost halfway up the lift in this position before I gave in to the pain and could no longer endure the laughing coming from my brother-in-law who was riding, in the correct position, a couple of T-bars behind me. In the real world, a lift operator would stop the lift upon seeing someone in the predicament I was in. Up here in the north country, however, my brother-in-law later related that the lift operator's only response was to remark, matter-of-factly, "Well, that's going to be a tough ride."

Fortunately for my body, I managed to master the art of riding the lifts over the ensuing days. All-in-all it was still a lot less painful than my attempts at snowboarding in Colorado the month before. Temperatures also got a lot more favorable on Friday and Saturday, which made for a much more enjoyable experience as well. Off the slopes, we discovered that a good number of the Sugarloaf employees had a penchant for drinking their wages away at the local eating and drinking establishments - the bartender referred to it as their own little form of "recycling." Not too surprising given the relative isolation of the place. I also learned that liquor companies like to give away t-shirts and headbands and lots of other stuff. I also learned that their products can cause headaches the next morning. 'Loafing, it seems, can be quite an educational experience.