A Moment In Time
“Once every 10 years we get a storm cycle like this,” said local photographer Matt Power, riding the Ajax Express with snow piling up on his lap. “This is something special.” I stuck my tongue out and felt two snowflakes land and melt instantaneously. With my eyes closed, I tilted my head up and let the snow fall down gently onto my face, thawing into cool drops of water on my cheeks below my goggles. It was day three, March 6, 2019, of FREESKIER’s annual Ski Test—FREESKIERFEST, as it’s affectionately known—and 13 inches of Colorado’s finest had fallen overnight. It was midday on Wednesday and the looming forecast held more of the same. We’d just come off a lap on Pussyfoot, dipped through the trees and hit the Hollywood jump underneath the Ajax Express with a group of 15 testers. Every hour, another inch blanketed the ground, and our persistent skiing was complemented by a seemingly everlasting snowfall. Someone asked, “Have you got the time?”
It’s peculiar how we can lose ourselves in the presence of the mountains, be so consumed by our surroundings that time itself seems to stop entirely; in some odd way, those transient moments incessantly ticking away on the clock seem to last forever. As skiers, it happens every time we make a turn. Translating thought to action, we experience the G-forces of a deeply cut left-handed carve on fresh, early morning corduroy or the subtle weight of powder snow against our chest as we float effortlessly through a gladed, snow-stacked wonderland. When conditions are perfect, when you can see your friends disappearing into powder clouds then reappearing next to you, when millions of pristine snowflakes are flying over your shoulders and you’re using gravity to paint tracks down the mountain, the moment becomes magnified. FREESKIER’s Ski Test cultivates this phenomenon.
