Ice-the-Cake Skiing

By Diana Hooley

Once when I was young girl in Indiana I leafed through a magazine and saw an advertisement for a ski resort in a place called Sun Valley. The picture showed happy people schussing down snow-covered mountains. I had no idea Idaho was mountainous.

It wasn’t until I married an Idaho farmer that I found out our state is full of mountains and several great ski resorts, too. I was intimidated by all these hearty, athletic Idahoans who skied—but my husband was one of those people, and he needed a skiing buddy.

My first attempt to ski was at Bogus Basin. When I got carsick on the curvy road up from Boise, it should have been a warning things might not go well. On the beginner’s hill I got rope burns from the towrope and decided to try my luck on the chairlift to Morningstar Run.

I kept my ski tips up like the sign said, but there were no instructions about how to disembark from the lift. When I saw other people ahead of me skiing off their chairs, I knew I was in trouble. My chair barely paused before I found myself lurching down an embankment.

Ski lift at Soldier Mountain. Diana Hooley.

For a few seconds I managed to stand upright, and then lost my balance and face-planted in the snow. It mortified me that the chairlift operator halted the entire lift just because I fell. People hanging in chairs above me stared down in pity.

When I took a look at the view from the top of Morningstar, I got over my embarrassment. It was breathtaking. The peaks of the Boise Mountains were white against a blue sky.

They looked covered in powdered sugar, an apt description since the “father of powder skiing,” champion Norwegian skier Alf Engen, founded Bogus Basin in 1939.

I had gotten off to a rocky start but my Idaho ski adventures were just beginning. I later took skiing lessons at Soldier Mountain near Fairfield and learned all kinds of maneuvers and ski terms like “snowplow” and “mogul.”

On the Soldier chairlift, I talked with a teenager who expanded my ski vocabulary even more.

“Yeah,” he said, “that last run, it was pretty gnarly.”

“Gnarly?”

“Uh…I mean like real fast and hard, get it?”

I didn’t get it. I knew people downhill-skied for the thrill of it. They wanted to “shred the gnar”—but that wasn’t me.  I preferred skiing down gentle slopes: icing the cake rather than shredding the gnar. I wanted an outdoors activity for exercise and to experience a beautiful winter landscape.

My husband and I took our kids with us to ski as often as we could afford. One Christmas on Brundage Mountain near McCall, I temporarily lost my sons, John and Sam, who were then eleven and eight. I should have predicted where we’d find them.

They were trying to “catch air” on the hilly Black Forest Run. Brundage wasn’t the only mountain we skied where someone got lost.

When Sam was in high school I took him with me to check out Pomerelle south of Burley. The snow was fantastic, and it didn’t let up when we were caught in a sudden snow squall high on a hill. I found myself skiing blind in a white-out and soon became disoriented and frantic. Then I heard my son’s calm voice somewhere below me, “Mom?” 

No sweeter word was ever spoken—especially considering my situation. With Sam in the lead and me skiing close behind, we eventually made it back down to the lodge.

I’ve never been a great, or even a good skier, but I’ve enjoyed the sport. When the pandemic hit I didn’t ski for three years, not until last winter. Maybe it’s because I’m older, but my entire body hurt. I could feel the sciatica in my back and arthritis in my knees.

It was discouraging, and then I got a chairlift to the top of the mountain. Once again the view was spectacular. Those powder-sugar peaks never fail to leave me breathless.

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