A history of apathy

Guilty isn't the way to describe it. It was the strangest mix of emotions: sympathy, chagrin, a crystal-clear moment of clarity.
Fifteen minutes before, I'd been stuck 40 feet above the ground, swaying and bobbing in the wind as the winter wind breezed over the chairlift. It was a bright sunny day - you could see all the way to the Kootenays, snow-capped mountains all the way around.
But I was too busy being irritated by a stalled chairlift to really appreciate it. After a delay of 10 minutes, the chair began moving, and I stopped cursing. I spent the rest of the ride thinking of clever biting comments to relay to our lifties, for how dare they keep us waiting for so long?
Then I saw him. Surrounded by seven ski patrollers. CPR. Defibrillators. Tears. Curious lookie-loos. A man, who appeared to be in his 50s, lying dead at the bottom of the ski lift off-ramp.
He was gone, but they were trying to bring him back.

What do you say or think at a moment like that? Anything sarcastic I had to say to the lifties was gone, replaced by a shame. Then a curious understanding of the situation. He was dead. He died doing something he enjoyed. I wasn't dead. And I was doing something I enjoyed. It took someone's death to make me feel alive, instead of me going through the motions of living.
It was, by far, one of the most enjoyable days of riding of my life. We joked the poor guy was probably up there in heaven, looking down at the sun-kissed slopes of Big White, thinking "why couldn't I have died at the END of the day?"

Carpe Diem. And RIP.




OK, so here are some vids from the day...
First up is "The Cliff" - the video doesn't do it justice. It's about a 70 percent grade - complete with rocks, gullies and avalanche dangers. But we made it...

Second up was our run through the glades to get there... lots of pow, though I still haven't learned to point my head in the right direction when I stick my camera behind my goggle strap. I'll figure it out soon enough...
(BTW, is it me, or do I have a Michael Jackson/Mike Tyson falsetto on tape?)

Just click on the pics to see the videos...