Sept 21

Road trip. Today was another day of work in Kamloops. A road trip to work and a chance to clear my mind. I cranked up the volume of my stereo and headed up the Coquihalla Highway.

The highway rises from the valley and heads upward. My Chevy Duramax diesel eats the kilometres like a hungry snake as the road stretches towards the sky. I crank up the music and tune on the satellite radio, I enjoy the therapy of the open road. I look in my mirror and see the reflection of our lake and beyond: our mountain. I reflect upon how much our world has changed since covid19 stopped our lives.

It has been six months since they closed Big White, six months since the pandemic stole the end of an amazing season. Now the next ski season is rapidly approaching. It will be a new world and a new experience at our home in the clouds. Life has been returning to a sense of normal, yet things are anything but normal anymore.

Cresting the mountain pass I can see far into the distance. I can see the forest, the trees, and the clear-cut timber that checkers the vista like a patchwork quilt. The alpine peaks in the distance beckon me. I look forward to the coming ski season. I hope with nervous trepidation that the mountains will be blanketed with snow and that we can avoid the threatened second wave of covid19.

Our boating season is coming to an end; soon it will be time to hit the slopes. All predictions were wrong when it came to the boating season. I wonder how the ski season will be. I have learned not to trust the prognosticators and the so-called experts. Every day is fluid in the coronaverse and I am optimistic that we will get a full season. I am hopeful I will get one hundred days on the top of the world. I have averaged forty days on skis the past ten years. Now with more time available to me, I hope to ski more. I hope to live more.

Hope is what I cling to as the seasons change. It seems as though even the trees have resisted the end of summer. They are just now turning to hues of gold and red. In all of nature’s glory, time marches on. We have spent half a year under the threat of our viral foe. Nature continues its miraculous change; soon snow will begin to fall upon the mountains of our world.

I look forward to the changing seasons, to the passing days. Looking forward is all we can do. I hope for another epic ski season filled with powder days.