 Poster: A snowHead
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Question is as it states, what is it about it? Why do I travel somewhere to sit on a chairlift looking, dreaming at the run below in such a bizarre alien environment. How can sliding, thanks to gravity,over frozen water create such feelings. Why do I sit here in a damp autumn in the UK dreaming of the mountains....is it adrenaline, creativity, speed... Idont know, I just know I love it. I gues I over analyse but would love to know...why?
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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Because . . . . . 
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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that's a very philosophical post for a first post.
Cos we all love the whhhooooooooooooshhhhhhhhhh! Bring it on!
Welcome to 
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
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what is the whoooooooooshhhhhhhhhhhhh! ( i know what it is but why??)
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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dreamers, welcome to the reason of life................
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You'll need to Register first of course.
You'll need to Register first of course.
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(Ok, don't laugh, serious bit here)
I was thinking about this a few years ago and realised that, for me, it's the smell. Or the lack of stink. You know, the freshness. The ozone...
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ok, clear air, clear head...
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....the rich food and excess alcohol fermenting in the lower intestine......
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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I think the turning of the leaves and the first frosts of the autumn bring similar feelings out in pretty much everyone here!
When I was 7 I remember packing my flight bag in September for the ski holiday booked for the following February. Have never quite lived that down.
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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I would just like to know why I always yawn on chairlifts. It doesn't make sense.
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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Because the more insulated you are from your environment (i.e. the ground) when moving, the slower your perceived relative speed. 40mph on skis might feel like 80 on a motorbike and you'd have to do 120 in a car for the same feeling. Mach2 on Concorde wouldn't feel like anything because you would be totally isolated (it's so sad to think Concorde will not fly again). Being so close to the environment whilst moving at speed gives your sub-conscious a perceived sense of danger (even though skiing is a lot safer that many other activities which don't give a rush - crossing the road for example) and therefore creates adrenalin which pumps around you and there's probably endorphins in there too when you complete the run (I'm not a doctor) and there's your rush and satisfaction. This is why most men like to ski fast because (in caveman terms) we are the hunters who are programmed to like the adrenalin rush from danger in order to catch the hunt, and most women, the nurturers, don't like danger because they need to protect the children. This is not a sexist statement; it's just how the brain is wired.
Well I hope that covers it - but perhaps you weren't expecting such a serious answer, but I think a professional needs to think about this stuff - sorry - I'll try to come back with a witty one-liner later.
www.skiday.co.uk
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You know it makes sense.
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Last season I was skiing with my sister, on her first run ever, on a black diamond. In the middle of each turn when she was almost aiming straight down hill, she'd panic a bit. She asked me why did I enjoy this so much. Obviously skiing is not her first sport of choice, but she does it to spend time with the family.
My answer........that little surge of panic that she feels is an excitment. An Adrenaline Rush that I look for, enjoy and embrace!
Why am I looking to improve?..........I want the next challenge.
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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I dunno, why does tucking it down a run going so fast feel good? No idea, but damn does it feel good!  For me it's all aboutthe adrenaline rush and also the escapism - when I'm skiing, I forget all the worries and problems in my life.
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Poster: A snowHead
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You've got me thinking about this now. There's definitely the adrenaline buzz factor. I also think there's a real something about being in mountains even when they are not covered in snow there is something mystical and wonderful about mountains. I've been to some stunning coastline but it doesn't give that same feeling as being in mountains.
God that sounds cranky.
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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Why?
Because you can be "at one with nature"
Because of the fresh air
Because of the beautiful surroundings
Because of the rush
Because it's not work
Because, just because.
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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... the lady loves Milk Tray.
WTFH. The man from Milk Tray.
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
You need to Login to know who's really who.
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the scenery, the snow, the speed, the sound, the silence, the style, the sophistication, (uh oh running out of good s's now) the sallopettes, the sider.............
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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Yep, agree with all of the above, it is still very bizarre though...but then isn't everything if you over analyse
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You'll need to Register first of course.
You'll need to Register first of course.
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The beautiful scenery is a part of it for me, the good company as well as the physical side of it including the odd burst of adrenalin. But by far the best part is the mental focus that comes from really "getting in the groove". On a good run I'm so entirely focused on the skiing (although not consciously thinking about anything) that the rest of my life seems not to exist. It's a bit like meditation for me, I suppose. No worries about work, paying the bills, loosing control of the garden, stuff that needs doing around the house, or anything else that normally clutters up my mind. Although I normally come back from a ski trip physically quite tired, mentally it's the most relaxing thing I do. All that, of course, when I'm happy with my skiing. When I don't think I'm skiing well it's just another worry to add to the list!
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"Powder snow skiing is not 'fun'. It is life fully lived, life lived in a blaze of reality." (Dolores La Chapelle)
Yes, I know that doesn't tell you why, but it's a good quote.
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My apologies to those who have seen this already - and I have still not got around to a final edit - but here is something I wrote some time ago.
Leaning out.
When you ski a steep slope you must lean out. You have to re-educate your fear. Only practice does this.
Why lean out? I could show you easily if you were here. Stand sideways on an imaginary slope.
Lean strongly out: Your hips tip in to balance you. Notice how your weight is on the uphill edges of your feet? Your skis are automatically on their sharp edges, digging into slope. Lean fearfully in and your skis flatten to the slope: you slide and fall.
When you ski, you balance on your edges, facing out.
I was about four when I first put on skis, or rather, when I stood on one ski and my father (was it my father? That's how I imagine it) pushed down the lever on the cable binding; and then, precariously, I stood on the other, my mother perhaps holding me, as it, too, was done up.
Was it like that? Or was I lifted on?
There is nobody now who remembers.
After a few minutes sliding on the flat, my mother tells me, I said “Pooh will walk now”.
Or that’s what I remember her telling me years ago. She is vaguer about it now, though still eager to recount it, and I to correct her.
I was never good at sport, I was a quiet, solitary child. But after a while, that one week a year my parents took me skiing became my one true access to pleasure through the activity of my body in the world. I often dreamed about it .
Is elation an instinctive human reaction to mountains: the sense of awe at an enormous otherness: a sort of primeval metaphor of the spirit? Or is it only now, when some of us feel safe on the earth and death seems foreign?
I balance on the imaginary slope, above a gulf. The stance must prepare you for anything.
Turn your shoulders: your upper body must face down the slope. Top foot a little forward.
Now you are ready to turn. But to turn the ski must be on its other edge.
A ski is narrower in the middle than at its ends. If it is tilted on its edge (can you picture it?) to make the middle touch the snow - under your weight and the force of the turn - the ski must bend in an arc. .
And sliding on that arc you turn.
But first you must do the difficult thing, you must turn down the slope and and begin to fall: let gravity take you and not lean back.
The front of the ski does most of the steering. If your weight goes back on your heels you will lose control and fall. I can tell you, but it won’t help: if you learn to ski it will happen often, and still at moments of fear and self doubt.
You must balance on your feet like a dancer, the balance point of the ski under the balls of your feet: your upper body still, as the rest of your body twists and flexes from side to side.
And gradually the body absorbs it, all the constant, necessary shifts of weight and stance; till finally you simply ski, as, rising from a chair you simply walk ; though walking never seized the whole of your being like this, fixing you in the passing moment , the exact pull and texture of the earth as you pass over it, balancing on the edge of your possible. (Or was learning to walk a little like this?)
And what you are seeking, what it ends up being For, even if only sensed as a possibility rather than reached, is those moments when it all becomes effortless: when you forget the clumsy boots and cumbersome skis, forget even your separateness from the earth, and you fall in perfect balance.
Moments you could say, of ordinary transcendence.
And those moments you will remember in your bones and sinews for the rest of your life, and dream of and want to return to.
Not for nothing, when we see skill escape the struggle that made it, fitting its moment perfectly, in boxer or musician, do we speak of grace.
There are other ways to find something like it: in the depths of love, for example. But you can’t book that at Inghams.
For perhaps seventeen or eighteen years after my childhood I didn’t ski. The accidents of life happened, and part of me forgot. Then, twenty one years ago, a recurring dream brought me back to the snows .
I didn’t dream of skiing but of going to ski: and always when I arrived the snow melted or my skis disappeared or the lift broke. And when I woke, each time the disappointment was a little harder to shake off, as my bones remembered, gradually, my childhood dreams.
Since then I have skied every year: skiing more and more off piste, seeking the untouched places, the steeper slopes; accepting the small, accumulating bet on the stability of snow layers. The occasional heightened moments when to fall might be to die. Living in the moment. Not a pure “now” which would obliterate me, but a place where time becomes physical, expanding and contracting with my awareness of the landscape.
And within it there is a clarification or perhaps merely a simplification of the self.
Skiing a slope, the future becomes a narrow space, corresponding almost exactly with the physical space below me. My body following the line of my gaze as I thread between trees (fatal to look at them; you must look at the space between, where smoothly you will be and are). And the past is all my past selves looking out from behind my eyes, and nothing else.
Time, the abstract dimension of regrets and fears and plans, is where we live in exile, outside these privileged moments of Now. And if this Now is a kind of timelessness, it can also be experienced in other ways, for example in art , which, at its best, rather than narrowing time collapses the past and future into the Now.
The Time of the glacier is not our time, but sometimes we touch its coldness.
And places where where you have loved your life, themselves become loved: would be loved even if they weren’t so beautiful.
And on each huge flank how intimately the skier knows, or imagines with his body, each fold or furrow, the pleasure of carving the first track in untouched snow.
Even the ugly excrescences of ski lifts acquire a guilty allure, drawing the eye upwards.
And in absence the poor sap pores over piste maps and extreme ski videos: the pornography of his passion.
And now as I cycle in the evenings laboriously up Highgate hill to be fit, I count the weeks and hours.
Soon I will be there again: I will be exiting a cable car on a mountaintop, the landscape and sky opening into hugeness. The dusty old earth starting afresh, a virgin again under new snow. The cloud, perhaps, below us, filling the valley bottoms with soft inlets and bays of white.
We leave the crowd and walk to an edge, we step into our skis.
Below me is a white gulf where I must balance - a tilted page -
Already my eyes are tracing the promise of faint swells and hollows.
I push off and the wind greets my face.
I feel the exact give of the snow -
I lean out, I welcome life.
Last edited by After all it is free  on Wed 4-10-06 11:55; edited 1 time in total
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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why not?
[reference to heading]
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snowball, well put!
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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snowball, I really enjoyed reading that.
I still get the "no snow" dreams and the disappointment.
I didn't ski in childhood but had wanted to from at least my early teens; I was sad when my parents could not afford to send me on the school ski trip.
Now autumn starts the anticipatory build-up to my favourite week of the year (I like my summer holiday as well, but not as much).
And in answer to "Why?"
It is very difficult to explain and you have to try it to understand - a bit like s3x then!
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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snowball,
thanks for that, i think that is as good an explanation as any.
There aren't many things that make me feel like a kid again when everything was new and exciting (not tellign you the others!) but stepping off that lift, tightening the boots, clipping in, well that does evoke the same feelings as when I was 10...perhaps that is a significant part of...why
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its the same feeling i get when i race cars, bikes or anything else where i push myself to the edge. Part adrenaline rush, but also part of it is testing myself to see how far i can go with something. I guess fear is involved too, since alot of it is going to my limits and beyond.
Which is why you'll see me doing alot of cartwheeling down mountains... thats my excuse anyway.. 
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You know it makes sense.
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| Quote: |
| PhillipStanton said: I was thinking about this a few years ago and realised that, for me, it's the smell. Or the lack of stink. You know, the freshness. The ozone... |
You haven't tried the skiing in Borovets then???
For me Why: it's the adrenaline, but more than that it's the sustained rush, and forgeting everything else as you concentrate entirely on that next turn. I get a similar rush skydiving and game shooting but it only lasts for a few minutes.
With skiing it goes on and on and on all day!
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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For me, it's about speed, adrenalin, scenery, being in the open and doing something in a totally different environment. It's also about having a laugh with mates
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Poster: A snowHead
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dreamers, snow has always made me feel like a child again. A snow filled landscape seems like a magical world to me, and gliding about it (almost) effortlessly (when things are working for me) is just a bit more magical.
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
You need to Login to know who's really who.
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Sharkymark, don't knock it, it comes to us all
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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Hoppo, you sentimental old tart yer 
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You'll need to Register first of course.
You'll need to Register first of course.
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If you even hasve to ask why, you're not getting it
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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Sharkymark, Packing what's that then? We just put a couple of Cool boxes in the back of the Datsun 4x4 stick on the Telepeage and off we go 
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boredsurfin, as we rent our place out, we still have to pack unfortunately. It's getting easier though, Skiwear is now permanently packed. Our storage room will be ready soon, so that'll be even less to put in the car.
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FAQ
