Chill illustrates a fourth cover for Pique!

I’d spent some quality time with Vail’s mountain map the evening before. Here’s what I learned. Base elevation: 8,120’; Peak elevation: 11,570’; Acreage: 5,289; Terrain: 18% easiest, 29% more difficult, 53% most difficult! 53% most difficult? How, I wondered, could a resort with over half of its terrain rated most difficult be consistently rated the top ski area in the US?

Here’s how. T’ain’t true. T’ain’t even close. If half of Vail is most difficult, 80% of Whistler is impossible. Half of Vail is most difficult in the same way XXL sweatshirts at American Eagle are market ‘Medium’. It’s a feel-good, better-than-you-are marketing spin. Either that or it’s a paranoid fear of litigation.

While I salivated over the flipside of the map, the side that highlighted the back bowls and Blue Ski Basin, a teasing landscape of black diamonds, the reality on the ground was true blue. The bowls were beautiful and the snow was copious and still falling but the overall terrain had more in common with Sun Peaks than Sun Bowl. It was a panorama of hero blacks, braggin’ blacks, blacks in name only.

by G.D. Maxwell