Golden leaves carpet the trails, gray patches grow in my burgeoning fall beard, two ski movies premiere in town this week, and the itch is becoming harder to ignore. What was once a whisper is growing into a shout and the usual dichotomy between those hanging onto summer and those frothing for winter has the bar conversation lively, if predictable. Most are wary, traumatized as they were by the stinginess of last ski season, an understandable stance but lamentable. October is for delirious optimism, not caution.
In that spirit, true to my nature and history, I have been spending the last two weeks casually but insistently spreading an important prognostication – it’s going to be a 600-inch winter…pass it on! Spoken softly and tantalizingly into ears as a lover would, the message shivers up goose-bumped backs in the manner of a sexual invitation. Shouted into the phalanx of a crowded concert, the stoke spreads as a benevolent virus, short-circuiting rational thought and inciting wide-eyed grins, reckless amounts of high-fives, and relief that it is okay to believe again.
Naysayers question my data, scoff at the suggestion that Vail would miraculously eclipse its historic total purely on the gut feeling of one mildly unhinged fanatic. I laugh heartily in return, mirthful at the very idea that I have any scientific basis on which to rely. Those negative Nelsons and Nellies clearly do not know me, one who operates on intuition, who is fueled primarily by hope, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and the lingering fumes of last spring’s waxing sessions. Skiing is not a serious activity, only the organizing principle of my existence and that of my daughter and entire family and all of my friends, so I take it with the requisite mixture of lassitude and obsession that confuses all but the deep psychos.
Essentially everyone I know is floundering in the stew of malaise, professional obligation, terror, occasional elation, and vicious uncertainty that is the hallmark of living in 2026. Unable to shake last year’s meager snowfall in the same manner that a golfer gets the yips – knowing that it is time to move on, but unable to do so – many are locked in a negative cycle of disbelief that threatens to subsume. They have been hurt and aren’t yet ready to love again. For this entire section of the populace, I am the buoyant best friend encouraging them to get back out there, to find happiness in snowy boughs that exist above the mire.
A 600-inch winter is the message that you did not know you needed to hear, but I dream that it echoes in the cavernous walls of your mountain-loving corpus. Ideally, it is the phrase that greets you with each gloriously chilly autumn morning, the mantra that lulls you into sleep movies in which deep, dry powder blows straight over your head. It is a statement that is all the more powerful for its absurdity, an important value that we usually eschew in favor of reality, as if there is one measure, one rubric thereof.
Rendered dissolute by the myriad distractions of our technological and media-driven age, collective action has become increasingly difficult. We need a unifying force, a community rallying point, an idea around which to coalesce. Political aspirations are important, but two- and four-year cycles are no temporal match for the infinite joy of a bonkers winter of snowfall. Assembling a cadre of believers, one lunatic at a time, is the way to rejigger the energy fields so as to manifest the blissful, blizzarding outcome that we so desperately need and want. I can feel the electrons of each of your nascent 600-inch beliefs buzzing around, creating a paradigm shift as the time until Opening Day dwindles.
It may not snow six hundred inches this winter. It probably will, but it might not. And yet, what if it does?