Hittin’ the slopes
Most people schedule their spring semester around their classes, deciding when they can go to work or hit the gym based on whether or not they have a class or a heavy homework load.
A select few students, such as Kevin Clifford, on the other hand, plan their classes around ski days. When Kevin and many other “ski bums” went to register for classes at the end of last semester, they were not thinking about when they wanted to get up for class in the morning or how to organize their class load, but rather how many vertical feet they could rack up in the coming season.
Now that the semester is on its way, Kevin gets through the MWF classes – often waking up at sunrise to get to his earliest class – just to catch the next big storm or get in an extra park run. To most students, skiing every Tuesday and Thursday wouldn’t be worth taking classes at 7:30 in the morning and two-and-a-half hour classes in the evening, but to Kevin it translates to two extra days of skiing a week.
Kevin’s average Thursday starts at 6:30 a.m. with rolling out of bed and eating some breakfast before heading out to his 7:30 microeconomics class. After class, Kevin goes back to his dorm where he gets back in bed until 10:30. Then, everyone who wants to go skiing that day assembles and heads to the car.
Around noon the car full of ski enthusiasts pulls into the parking lot of Beaver Mountain. Within 10 minutes of arriving, Kevin is getting another colorful sticker attached to the back of his season pass. As he gets on the lift, he counts up how many he has amassed so far and announces that it’s his 22nd day skiing Beaver this season. What he doesn’t say is that over the breaks for Thanksgiving and winter, he skied an additional 20-something days on his home mountain Sierra at Tahoe. Forty days of skiing seems like a lot for a season, but there are still two months to go until Beaver closes.
Finally at the top of the mountain, Kevin turns on his iPod to his ski playlist, which consists of mostly oldies and classic rock with a Shakira or Lil’ Wayne song thrown in. With everything else blocked out, Kevin takes his first runs, always warming up with a powder run or a nice groomer. Then, depending on the conditions, its park or powder for the rest of the day. With only a quick break for a lunch consisting of saltines and cookies, Kevin skis till the lifts stop running at 4:00. As soon as Kevin gets back, he showers, pops a bag of popcorn for dinner and runs to Intro to Islam, an evening class he said was the most interesting of the limited classes that were available.
With his schedule filled with classes and ski days, finding a job that helps him pay for food, gas and a season pass was impossible. A month into fall semester, Kevin had all but given up looking for a part-time job when a friend of Kevin’s told him about the Biomat Plasma donations. Earning 55 dollars a week, Kevin managed to save up for a season pass and enough gas money to bring his car from California for the spring semester.
I asked Kevin, with a possible 60-day season in his future, what he thought about skiing over 50 days a season for the next three years of his college career he replied with one word: “DOWN.”
– sterlingboin@gmail.com