Amy, Sarah and I spent an extended weekend downhill skiing in Vermont with Amy's parents. Amy's Dad Klaus is amazing - at 82 years old he still skis down the mountain with little visible effort. And Amy and Sarah zip down the hill quite elegantly.
We had beautiful weather at first. It was cold enough for the snow to be easily skied on, but not so cold that our fingers, toes or noses complained.
Then it rained overnight, and the weather changed. We woke up the next morning in a dense fog. Skiing is hard in the fog. You no longer have a visual sense of the trails. You have trouble finding the people you are skiing with. And in the dim flat light, it's hard to see where the bumps or icy spots on the trail are.
But amazingly, as we took a second lift higher up the mountain, the sun broke through, and we were surrounded by clear weather. It was a weather inversion, warmer and clearer at the top than at the bottom of the mountain. As we looked down the ski trail, a sea of fog stretched out below us, with occasional mountain tops sticking out. It was like the view from an airplane at 30,000 feet (fortunately we were only at 3,300 feet).
As we skied down the hill, we could see the fog ahead of us. (Yes, that red dot is Amy's Dad.) We took the lifts up from the middle of the mountain, rather than skiing the whole hill, to minimize our time in the fog.
The skiing wasn't as nice as the earlier days; with the combination of sun and fog, cold and warm, the snow underfoot varied from frozen and bumpy to soft and forgiving to heavy and wet. But the spectacle was breathtaking. We would make our way down the slope, from light into fog; then ride the chair lift back up into the light. Before each run, we would look around again and the ocean of fog below and the beautiful sky above, and say to each other, "Wow!"
