Drowsy Driving
Photo by Krzysztof Hepner on Unsplash
Christmas Day: it had been a great day on the hill skiing with my son, then a young teenager: good sunlight, crisp temperatures, plenty of snow on the trails, and modest holiday lift lines that meant lots of vertical.
It was late afternoon, time to hit the road and go home for the holiday dinner. The drive was a familiar one, about an hour; mostly on a clear, four lane divided highway. My son was asleep in the passenger seat by the time we cleared the parking lot. I turned up the thermostat to summer temps and cranked up the sound to blast level on my favorite CD.
Halfway home the trip the trip ended suddenly, up against a guardrail, the left front of the station wagon ripped away by the collision. The cause of the accident wasn’t nature. The weather that afternoon was perfect. It wasn’t behavior. The trip from last run to the parking lot had no detours. I had slept well the night before, Despite all that, I fell asleep at the wheel.
Fortunately no one was hurt in the crash and no other vehicle was involved. Still it was a stunning first person introduction to –Drowsy Driving.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports an estimated 100,000 car crashes each year are caused primarily by drowsy driving resulting in more than 71,000 injuries and 6,400 deaths. Common causes for drowsy driving are fatigue due to insufficient sleep or dehydration, or the effects of medication. Middle of the night is the most treacherous common timeframe.
Late afternoon too.
We skiers face special risks, especially as we get older. .
Think about your own experience. You get in your car after spending much of the day out in the cold. You have had a good workout on the hill. You turn up the car thermostat right away to take away the chill. Chances are it is late afternoon. Even if there is no setting sun, the daylight is dimming. especially early in the ski season – December and January. On top of all this, there is the body’s natural tendency to lose energy late in the day.
All of this is no surprise. At least not until the effects of drowsy driving hit you.
Drowsy Driving is not just ski related. But ever since my accident – which remains vivid in my mind even through it was years ago – I am conscious of the risk every time I plan a day on the hill.
My thoughts include:
#1 Try to avoid solo travel. I always try to team up with a companion for the trip.
#2 Always bring along a container of liquid for the trip. I want something in the car.- coffee or water or a soft drink – to sip along the way. The new, popular 30 oz insulated containers work very well for this. Apres ski beverages can wait until I’ve reached my final destination.
#3 Always have sound on during the trip. Whether it is music, or news, or even a book narration, I want some noise in the car.
#4 This is the most important thing to me. I make at least one stop on the route, no matter how long the trip. I do not wait to feel tired. I plan ahead; a stop at least once every 30-45 minutes, to get out of the car, walk around, and refill whatever I’m drinking if possible. You may not feel the need to stop. But it is better to do it sooner than necessary and feel refreshed when getting back underway.
Drowsy driving is a serious matter. It sure can spoil a road trip. You don’t want to learn about it from experience if a few simple steps can keep it from happening in the first place.
Skiing the Snowfields and Couloirs of Turkiye with Dan Egan
He’s one of the most famous extreme skiers of all time, a super-nice guy, and a talented filmmaker whose latest, ‘Return to the Silk Road’, takes us skiing with him and his nephew through the mountains of Turkiye, formerly known as Turkey. I’m referring, of course, to Dan Egan, who also coaches backcountry skiing around the world in his sell- out clinics, from Les 3 Vallees, France to Big Sky, Montana, where this photo of the two of us was taken.
Egan screened the 20-minute film to attendees at the SnowBound ski show in Boston in November, where I was part of the audience oohing and aahing at spectacular scenes of daredevil skiing and equally memorable scenes of you-have-to-see-this-at-least-once-in-your-lifetime destinations like Cappodocia.
You are probably familiar with photos of hot air balloons floating over the otherworldly area of hundreds of small sandstone peaks, carved out for ancient dwellings. Egan takes you here when it’s all snow covered and even more magical. Here, kabobs replace schnitzel, sweet tea replaces gluhwein, and haggling over pennies for a souvenir or valuable hand-made Turkish carpet from a vendor in an old-fashioned souk replaces a pre-printed (and overpriced) pricetag elsewhere.
The film in part recreates Dan’s and his brother John’s roles in the groundbreaking 1991 Warren Miller ‘Steeper and Deeper’. There are plenty of clips from that film, along with behind-the-scenes stories from Egan and his longtime cameraman, Tom Grisson, who also shot the earlier film.
There are glorious long drone and bodycam shots of Dan and nephew Jonny pushing boundaries – both geographical and skiing – doing perfect s-turns down what looks like miles of fresh powder snowfields and narrow couloirs. Some of them, apparently, were first descents. And there are shorter ones of them skinning up to what the older Egan describes as a “whole other world”.
Some of his narration is philosophical, about how skiing and snowboarding connect generations, and how gratifying it was to recreate this trip with his brother’s son. Simply, “I love skiing with him,” Egan says about Jonny. It’s something we all can relate to when skiing or boarding with family, especially the next generation.
One segment that made me laugh is the crew discovering a time warp ski shop – filled with neon-colored one-piece ski suits like those worn in the 1991 film.
Since then, the resorts where they skied then – Cappodocia and the sides of the volcano of Mount Erciyes – have grown into world-class destinations from a single t-bar or single chair. And I do mean single chair, as in one-person chair.
These days, Erciyes has nearly 100 miles of marked trails, from beginner and intermediate cruisers to the expert terrain skiers named Egan eat for breakfast. And it’s an Indy Pass member.
It’s a delightful film for anybody who likes great snow, great views, great storytelling, and discovering new ski destinations to add to your bucket list.
Best of all, it’s free to watch on YouTube. Thanks, Dan Egan and your DeganMedia.
http://youtube.com/v/8Ui68wycz7k
See you on the slopes -maybe even the slopes of Cappodocia or Ercicyes in Turkiye.
My Favorite Place to Ski at Big Sky
Photo by Andrew Meehan on Unsplash
My favorite run at Big Sky just happens to be my mother’s name, Lizette. It is the kind of run you find out about from a local or a regular who knows where to find the best powder stashes. Or, you discover it by accident, as I did. Either way, it’s the kind of run that quickly becomes your top choice among a mountain of choices.
Lizette is a delicious glade, with myriad gentle bumps polka dotting wide-spaced evergreens and aspens. It’s tucked in between two of the perfect turn wide groomers on the Southern Comfort side of the mountain, thankfully missed or ignored by those zooming past the small sign turn-off. Often, I’ve been alone for the entire run, stopping not to catch my breath but to inhale the solitude.
Every time I ski Lizette, I know she is watching over me, making sure I have a great time. She even watches over folks I’ve introduced to the trail, such as Tom Alexander, a fellow skier from the 70+ Ski Club. He had never skied bumps or a glade before. I convinced him he could handle these powder puffs, promising that my mother would watch over him, too.
She did, of course. He did fine, and bragged about the experience over dinner that evening.
I learned to love mountains from the woman who grew up in a small town in Bavaria long before high-speed four-, six- and even eight-seater lifts, computers, digital remotes, live streaming, men walking on the moon or cars with automatic transmissions and lane departure monitoring.
She was sent to America alone in her early 20s just after WWI, to work and send money home to support her family struggling in an economic crisis not of their doing – like millions of immigrants before her and since. I cannot imagine her fear of heading to a land where she did not speak the language and knew nobody except the name on the piece of paper of a woman from her hometown who promised her a job when she got to NYC.
I grew up with stories of her childhood hikes in the nearby Alpine mountains, walking to the local tavern to fill her Poppa’s beer stein for dinner before the days of refrigeration at home, and bedtime readings of Heidi, who also loved the mountains. Okay – they were the Swiss Alps, not the Bavarian Alps, but why quibble.
Even though she never skied, she would get that wistful faraway look when somebody is calling up a memory whenever I described the crisp, clear air and spectacular picture postcard view from the top of some mountain I had skied. And she shook her head laughing in pleasure whenever my two then-young children told her about their yard sales and lost mittens at the mountains where they learned to ski.
My mother Lizette passed away in 2005 at the impressive age of 103. It was before I had discovered “her” run, so I could not tell her about it, and enjoy her shaking her head and laughing in disbelief that there was a ski trail somewhere with her name on it.
But I do that now always on my first excursion of the day on the gladed trail named Lizette, looking up briefly and saying “Hi, Mom” – and on every lap that follows.
I always head to Southern Comfort in the morning, when it’s in full sun. It’s also when Big Sky’s powder hounds are headed elsewhere, so the lift line here tends to be short, and generally stays that way for the rest of the ski day. Also because this is an older, slower fixed grip triple, not one of the super-modern ones with heated seats and a bubble cover to further protect against the weather, like Big Sky’s Ramcharger, Swift Current and Powder Seeker lifts.
There’s also the opportunity to ski from Southern Comfort to the super-luxury Montage Resort hotel, where the lobby bathrooms have super-luxury heated seats. I cannot imagine what a woman who survived two World Wars and the Depression would think of those. My turn to shake my head and laugh.
There’s another bubble-chair here to a couple of groomers and one treacherous bump run, and no lift line any time I’ve ventured here.
Lizette is enough of a favorite that I did seven laps in a row one day last season – more or less, since I had stopped counting after four or five.
She was watching over me each time, and if you ski Lizette with me, she’ll watch over you, too.
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