May 12, 2009

A Snowbird Snapshot

I just got home from a quick trip to Utah. The journey involved riding four hours each way packed into an airplane full of adults coughing like chain smokers on brand new exercise bikes, babies screaming between sneezes and Japanese tourists wearing surgical masks and looking frightened. It’s a good thing I had my little bottle of hand sanitizer with me.

In Utah I went to a ski resort called Snowbird to speak and do some music for a conference. You know, about the only thing I can think of that is more fun than going to a ski resort in the Rocky Mountains in May is being paid to be there, without being a 57-year-old bus boy in a Ski Bunny Bar.

It has been quite a few years since I spent any time in the Rockies, and the last time I was out there I wasn’t exactly staying in the ritziest places. On this trip, I had a room on the top floor of a first-class hotel called The Cliff, an amazing lodge right at the base of the slopes.

From my room I had a great view of the mountains, a panorama of most of the area’s challenging and beautiful ski runs. I had the same terrific view from my shower, since the wall of the bathroom over the tub was a window. Of course, this also gave any skier who might happen to be interested a terrific view of me.

There was a spa at the top of the hotel, with a well-equipped workout room, saunas, a rooftop outdoor lap pool and hot tub, a locker room in which you could host a wedding reception, and a whole hallway of “treatment rooms.”

The poster explaining the “treatments” at the spa showed a picture of a woman lying on a table, wearing nothing but a towel and looking kind of dreamy, while another woman played some kind of solitaire tic-tac-toe on her bare back with a bunch of big, smooth black rocks.

The brochure touted “Bodywork: 11 varieties of massage including Swedish Massage, Couples Massage, Deep Tissue, LaStone Therapy, Aromatherapy, High Altitude adjustment, Thai Massage, Shiatsu, Maternity Massage, Reflexology, and Seaweed Recovery Pack.”

It’s good to know that if your seaweed should happen to need recovery, the spa has a pack to take care of that.

I ran into some pretty interesting people in the spa. Some were obviously rich folks who were able to spend a lot of time at Snowbird or resorts like it – you could tell by their expensive haircuts and Patek Philippe watches (apparently Rolex is for peasants).

These people typically had zero body fat, so the well-tanned skin of their faces was stretched over their cheekbones like rawhide drum heads. Any time I gave one of them a friendly, “Hey! ‘Sup?” they would merely raise one sun-bleached eyebrow over aristocratic pale blue eyes and stride off to their Shiatsu appointment.

The younger locals, mostly hotel employees, were a lot more fun. For one thing, they were strong and fit, but they also had a nice healthy layer of beer fat. And since we were almost always in a situation where I would be giving them a tip at some point, they were generally willing to carry on a friendly conversation.

In fact, they were almost always eager to tell me how they like to spend their off hours, the reason they are in Snowbird in the first place. This generally involved things that make merely hurtling down a snow-covered mountain with a 3,000 foot vertical drop on a pair of skis seem about as wild as getting one of those Maternity Massages.

A common pastime seemed to be “Back Country Skiing,” in which one spends three or four hours climbing up a sheer cliff with skis or snowboard strapped to a backpack, then slides back down, staying just out ahead of whatever avalanche or rock slide you happen to set off.

The only thing more astonishing than that is the fact that I spent four days in Utah, the reddest state in the Union, and I did not run into a single person who admitted to being a Republican.

It really is a brave new world!

Copyright ©2009 Michael Ball. Distributed exclusively by North Star Writers Group.

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