What I really think about snow-making at Snowbowl [UPDATED]

UPDATE 24 December 2021:

After nearly 25 years as a passholder, and almost 40 now since the day I first learned to ski, in a blizzard on the Prairie, I've found that it is all-too-easy to armchair QB Snowbowl while failing to recognize its vast organizational and technological complexities, all of which are wholly and entirely weather (read: wind/snowfall) dependent. 

It's days like today, when 15" of thick, spreadable, cream cheese fell from the sky overnight, and wind and rime compelled the operators to shut down almost the entire resort, one chair after the other, throughout the morning, which tempt even the most faithful to unrestrained snark and prolific grumbling. 

And yet, we return, year after year, storm after storm, not just because Snowbowl is the only game in town, but because, when Snowbowl is good, it's very good, despite the fact that "snow-making" did nothing to mitigate the 'Bowl's persistent wind-closures.

Sometimes, like today, when the Upper Bowl is open from Rustler to Larry's, and the out-bound meadows are wide, skippable, and fresh, and the snow-snakes have all been fully eradicated by repeated ample dumps, it is even Very Very Good.

---

Tomorrow night our City Council will hold one last session wherein public opinion on the subject of selling well- or reclaimed-water to the Arizona Snowbowl for artificial snow-making will be heard. I'm not planning to attend. I have a feeling the whole thing's a done-deal. Not to sound too-much the cynic, but money talks, ya know; it's sorta the way things roll in Flagstaff.  Nevertheless, for posterity... and just in case someone with their finger more on-the-pulse or better able to get-the-ear of our oft' misguided but generally well-intentioned Council happens upon this post... I wanted to state my case.  For the record, you know.

I love to ski.  Anyone who knows me knows that.  But that's an easy thing to say: "I love to ski."  Anybody who's ever skied has probably described the experience with the same words.  But, really, in my case, it's the truth: I love to ski. That is simply the best way to express my fondness for skiing.  I love it.  Absolutely totally love it.

I learned to ski at the Arizona Snowbowl in late 1984.  I don't remember what month of that season I first made the trip up the road, whether it was November or December.  But it was during my senior year in high school.  I was a late bloomer. My buddy Derrill and I learned together.  And every year since, pretty much without fail, we still make at least one trip up the mountain together for a day skiing.

I've had a season pass at Snowbowl for 10 or 12 years now... ever since I could afford such an expensive luxury.  And I've always felt that it was a $400.00 gamble... some years it snows a lot, some years not so much.  Ya take what you can get on the Peaks.  This is, after all, Arizona.

I think I'm a fairly decent skier.  I ski with a lot of folks who are a lot better than me.  Folks with names well-known on the mountain... unlike my own.  And they school me.  Regularly.  But I can hang, much of the time.  And even if I can't, even when I flail, even when I flail huge, I've still almost always got my stoke on.  Because I love to ski.

When Snowbowl's open, I'm there every chance I get.  Every Opening Day (and sometimes well before that I'm hiking up Ridge for first tracks on Upper White Lightning).  Every Snow Day.  Every weekend.  Every holiday.  I never take personal days from work.  Except to ski.  When Snowbowl's open in November, I'm there in November, rejoicing.  When they're open until April, I'm there until April, rejoicing again.  I'm there every chance I get, thick or thin, wet and cold, sunny and baking, I'm there.  Sometimes a full day, sometimes a half day.  It doesn't matter.  I'm up and down that road so often every season that I get seriously sick of driving it.  But I do it.  Because I love to ski.

Love to ski.  Wish I could ski more.  If I could choose to do anything other than hang out with my family, I'd choose to go skiing.  When I grow up and finally get to retire from my job-job, I want to join the ski patrol.  I'm serious.

All that being said, I nevertheless stand AGAINST the proposal currently before the Council to sell water (any water) to the Arizona Snowbowl for the purposes of making artificial snow.

Here's why, in a nutshell:

• This is Arizona.  It will always be Arizona.  Arizona will never regularly be a great place to go skiing.  
• Water is valuable, too valuable to misuse.  Drinking water especially.  Especially in Arizona.
• Reclaimed water (effluent) still has lots of drugs and metals in it.
• Snowbowl, it's employees, and the city arguably stand to benefit more from the area becoming a year-round, four-season resort than they do from extending the ski season by a month or two via snow-making.
• Those with a vested interest in the Snowbowl LLC are the only ones who stand to benefit in any material way from the introduction of snow-making at the ski area.   
• There is no way to gauge any variation in Snowbowl's impact on the local economy between lean, short-season years and years of abundant snow and long seasons.  Lengthening the season with snow-making will have no measurable effect on the local economy.

What do I think Snowbowl should do?

• Fix the always-slipping-on-powder-days cable/bull-wheel assembly on Agassiz and stop paying for all this litigation.
• Resubmit.  Go get another EIS, one that includes mountain biking and interpretive hiking and whatever... and become a real four-season resort so you can employ people year-round and sell over-priced hot dogs and hot cocoa year-round, too.
• Accept the fact that, despite the aging infrastructure and cigarette-smoking Phoenicians, Snowbowl works pretty-much okay just the way it is and that we're lucky to get whatever snow we get whenever we get it.   And we ought to just enjoy it. As it is.  Remember: this is Arizona.

Just about a bike: Retrotec

I wish I could tell you my first mountain bike was a Raleigh Elkhorn.  But it wasn't.  My little brother's first mountain bike was a Raleigh Elkhorn.

To me, his second-hand Elkhorn was a very cool bike... I envied it from the git-go.  Right down to the one-size-fits-all paint-color (forest green, natch).  In 1991, to my untrained eye, his Elkhorn just seemed to be a bike built for one thing: riding around in the woods.  I envied it then.  I'm still a little envious of it now.  And I'm more than a little disappointed that he sold it... probably to some dirt-bag who ruined it leaving it out in the snow all winter, or let it get stolen, or let it disintegrate into just another a clapped-out beater bike downtown.  Tell ya what: someday I'm gonna find me a really sweet old Elkhorn of my own... one that someone's been keeping in a nice, dry garage for like 30 years.  And I'm gonna ride it a bunch, in the woods, and I'm never ever going to sell it.

No. My first mountain bike was not an Elkhorn.  

My first mountain bike was a Motiv Ground Pounder.  A what?

Cactus Cup, March 1992

Motiv's were everywhere in the 1990s.  Sold then, and until recently, by Price Clubs, Costcos, and other similar big-box-bulk retailers, Motiv bikes were inexpensive mountain bikes aimed squarely at the mass market.  Back in mountain biking's hey-day they sported pseudo-exciting names (like Ground Pounder, Rock Ridge, and Stone Grinder), garish color-schemes, goopy Taiwanese TIG-welds, super-wide, deeply-padded saddles, and cheap Shimano gruppos (mine was Exage 500LX) with the number of gears (21-speed!) labeled prominently on the chainstay.  Lots of people had them.

But today, if you scour the Internet for any information on old Motiv mountain bikes (I know; I tried.) you'll come up nearly empty-handed.  Nonetheless, I will always credit my old Motiv, my first mountain bike, as the important and valuable... seriously: life-changing... bike that it really and truly was.

Scottsdale, AZ, 1992

But I didn't ride the Motiv for long.  

I owned it for a little over a year before I gave it (sold it?) to my other younger brother so it could become his first mountain bike.  

I moved to Flagstaff in 1991. By the time the summer of 1992 rolled around I'd finally saved up enough money working the night shift at Bookman's to buy myself a new bike... actually just a new bike frame... stripped naked and devoid of any-and-all parts, accessories, or accoutrements such as frame decals or head-badges.  Nevertheless it was, at the time, The Bike Of My Dreams... a Bob Seals Retrotec... Number 64, to be precise.  Not exactly a custom bike, built just for me... but a brand new, exotic, handmade steel mountain bike like no other that might as well have been built just for me.

Moab, UT, 1993

Within two weeks, I'd had it powder-coated (black), built it up with whatever discounted parts I could scrounge at my local bike shop, and got busy riding it.  It's silly, and probably still a figment of my imagination, but I swear: the bike immediately improved my abilities as a rider.  I'd never crossed Rocky Ridge, the then-super-challenging, quite-well-named, local trail I'd been practicing my skills on for at least a year, with fewer than 4 dabs... until my first ride across its undulating traverse on the Retrotec... when I cleaned it, in its entirety. No dabs at all!   Needless to say, it was more-or-less at this moment that I became a believer in the value of a good bike... and in the assertion that my Retrotec, more than most other bikes in the world, possessed some sort of special magic that made me a better rider.

The Retro's still a favorite-bike.  And I still ride it a lot, several times a month, for sure.  But it's changed character more than any of my other bikes in the intervening years.  It's had flat bars and riser bars, as well as a Surly Torsion Bar with huge sweep... it's had rigid forks and suspension forks, cantilever brakes and widget brakes, toeclips and clipless pedals, bar ends or not, several wheelsets, all kinds of new gearing, and more than a couple different stems... including, at one time, an Allsop suspension stem which failed rather catastrophically on me while I was riding down a big rock in Sedona.  Ka-blooey.

Now, some 20 years later, the Retro's become a bit of a relic, I guess.  Over the years it's been broken and repaired (by Curtis Inglis).  And it's broken me pretty badly a couple times, too.  It's really just another in a long line of well-worn old hand-built mountain bikes from the 1990s.  They're not all that rare.  Not really.  That's certainly one way to look at it anyway.  And, indeed, that's the most common reaction to the bike when I show up for a group ride riding it.  But I prefer to view it as more of a period-piece... a good, solid, working example of a by-gone but-good era, of a time not so long ago, back when mountain biking was a lot newer.  That makes its mostly eclectic and almost universally obsolete parts-mix a little more interesting and a whole lot less sad.

Coconino National Forest

I like the bike's unpainted clearcoat finish and the way the brass fillets add golden details to the bike's otherwise gray color.  I'm quite proud of the clearcoated Koski DuraTrack fork and Salsa ProMoto stem, too, as well as the black-anno IRD seatpost, silver IRD Widget brakes, and black IRD rear-brake booster.  I like the old ratcheting black Shimano Deerhead top-mount shifters, the Dia-Compe SS-5 brake levers and the Oury grips.  I think the gun-metal-blue and silver XTR M900 rear derailleur is the best looking bike part Shimano ever produced, and that the polished silver XT hubs and the 110mm 5-bolt XT cranks run a close second and third (in that order).  I'm convinced the hand-laced wheels built on gray Mavic 217 hoops match the frame color almost perfectly.  I still think they're simple-n-cool, so I have old-school Onza clipless pedals on most of my bikes, including this one.  And finally, I think the black 1-inch Chris King 2Nut headset and the stainless King bottle cages add a nice touch of class.

For what it's worth, the black Ritchey Pro 30mm riser bars and the Specialized BG Pro saddle aren't really period, but they're not ridiculous either.  Plus, I like them.

It started with a Motiv.  Sure.  The Motiv set the hook in me, no question about it.  But the Retrotec will always be the bike that taught me how to ride well and moreover, how to become a better rider.  And for that I'll always sorta consider it First-Bike.

The Motiv's long gone, and that's okay.

The Retro will always be with me.

Click images to enlarge

Mountain Bike Action - Dec. 1992

Bicycling+Mountain Bike Mar. 1993

Bicycling+Mountain Bike - Mar. 1993

Today we did not shred.

Nope. Today we definitely did no shredding.

But, we rode.  That we did.

However, instead of covering a ton of ground during our two-and-a-half hours out in the woods together this morning, Ben and I rode maybe three miles.  Maybe.   But, it really doesn't matter, because they were really interesting miles... We'll call it a Photography Ride: a ride where both riders take their good cameras along, and there's no other objective during the ride but to use them.

I learned a lot on today's ride.  It was really interesting for me, a very rudimentary photographer with only the most basic equipment and skill, to listen and learn from Ben about things like lenses and lighting, foregrounds and backgrounds... stuff like that.

We both took a lot of pictures today, probably several hundred each.  These are a few of the best, I think:

Photo by Ben Nikon D200 Tokina 11-16mm	Photo by Me Nikon D40* Nikkor 18-55mm
	*Nikon D200

Riding with Ben

Ben and I go way back.

But until today, it had been ages since we'd shared a shred.

Like me, Ben's a school teacher in real life.  But he lives and works overseas, along with his family, so we see very little of them these days, except now-and-then on Google Chat.  However, they're all in Flagstaff for a couple weeks at the moment, house-sitting for some mutual friends.

Ben and I used to work together at Absolute Bikes.  Back in The Day.  So we've been on lots of rides together over the years.  Ben's always been a really great bike rider: fast, agile, stoked to ride.  Almost everyone who knows him knows that.

Fewer folk know that Ben's also a truly gifted photographer.  Always has been, long as I've know him. A dozen years ago or so he took a few pictures of my wife and I when we were all in Vegas for Interbike.  A couple of them have become a part of the permanent collection on display in our living room.




Over the years he's also taken a few pictures of me riding.

But today, on our first ride together in at least a year, around Dry Lake Hills, with his little pocket point-and-shoot camera, he really has outdone himself. If ya ask me: I think these pictures are awesome... and  not just because I'm in them.

My new favorite-picture of me riding.	The tree that almost killed me	Still riding those Onza pedals...
Dry Lake Hills		Dry Lake Hills

July is not just No-School Month and Work-At-The-Shop Month, it's also The Month Of The Tour

I love July because I don't have to teach in July.  It's the only month of the year that that's a fact.  Both June and August get cut into small parts by the school year.  But not July.  It's a nice respite, July.  Peaceful.

Nevertheless, in honor of July, the month without school, they've been working me pretty hard at Absolute Bikes the last week or so.  I told them I was cash-poor and wanted hours, and boy did I get 'em!  I think I've been on 7 of the last 9 days, or something like that.  It's already become kinda a blur.  Nine hours a day on the sales floor, for days on end... standing, running, lifting, making stupid mistakes...  Trust me: it's enough, to take all but the very last breath of wind out of my sails, come days-end... so this-here blog's been a mess of languish, and little more, of late.  I'm gonna try and fix that; I wanna fix that.  But we'll have to wait and see.

I've also been remiss in posting because I'm working on a post for Utility Cycling about riding Trailer-bikes (aka: Trail-a-Bikes©) with your kids.  It's not done, not by a long-shot, but it's already well overdue.  Truth is: I'm not sure when it'll actually be done.  Because, come July each year, new distractions enter my periphery every day.  See, July is not just No-School Month and Work-At-The-Shop Month, it's also The Month Of The Tour.  As in Le Tour De France.  Which, in case you don't know, is a bike race big enough to rival nothing less than the World Cup itself, both in terms of its grandeur and its obscurity.

Today's Tour stage, technically the second, but actually labeled the first (the one that comes after the Prologue, natch), was a flat sprinter's-stage in Belgium.  It ran rather predictably, 3 or 4 massive crashes in the last few Ks notwithstanding.  But, about 20 minutes into the broadcast there was this wonderful, brief moment, wherein I was reminded, quite unexpectedly, of my deadline, and of why bikes are just so great.

#Schultzfire Day Three

View this image as a timelapse .mov [Used with permission]

I don't really know what to say.

In a sense, I've "experienced" a lot of Arizona wildfires.  I remember most of the big ones pretty well:  Big Bug near Prescott in the 1970s.  Radio on Mount Elden in '77.  The great Arcosanti grassfire in '78.  The fatal Dude outside of Payson in '90.  Rodeo-Chediski on the Rim in '02.  Aspen on Mount Lemmon in '03.  Brins above Sedona in '06.  Crown King in '08.  Others, too.  But somehow, probably because of my proximity to them... because I was in Scottsdale or Tempe or Flagstaff, and they were somewhere else, they seemed kinda far away.  I was always impressed by all of them... by the pictures I saw in the news... by the devastation I saw first-hand later on... But still, all those fires were, to put it in simple terms: far away from me. Ya know...

Hardy, last Saturday, just a mile or so from our house changed all that.  But, it turns out, Hardy was just the beginning.

Then, I look at this picture (above), or I replay the video again.

Then I look at this map of Schultz (below).

And I'm completely speechless.


View Flagstaff fires in a larger map