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Season’s Greetings from the Beautiful Iowan Alps

In which The Boy and I take a trip to a Midwestern ski resort, and also down memory lane.

The (really quite reasonable) lift line at Mt. Crescent

The drive to Mt. Crescent is very different than how my typical ski day starts. Earlier this week, a few days after Christmas, The Boy and I loaded up our skis, boots, and snacks in the car and took off east from Lincoln, Nebraska, driving for about an hour through corn country and the Omaha suburbs before crossing the bridge into Iowa. On the other side of the river, we took a turn and drove along the edge of the Loess Hills, between farm fields and a line of rolling rises, until we arrived at Mt. Crescent and its glorious 300 feet of vert.

That kind of drop would barely make for a bunny hill in Colorado; it’s about half of the vert of Echo Mountain in Clear Creek County, the smallest resort I’ve skied in the state. But when you’ve grown up in the pancake-flat Midwest, it seems a lot bigger. I would know: People are surprised to hear I grew up walking distance from a ski shop, but I spent my junior high weekends in ski club, busing to hills around Illinois and Wisconsin with my friends. The mountains weren’t big—I remember drag-racing my friends down the blacks, a stunt that would end in Colorado with my gear spread across the run or my face through the windshield of a car in the parking lot—but when it’s what you’ve got, it’s what you’ve got.

Rhys scopes his line

Rhys started skiing at age 2, first at the park and then on packed-down forest roads around the Front Range, but he had never ridden a lift or skied a resort before, and I wasn’t sure how it would go. But he took to it right away. He needed a boost to get on the lift, but once on it, he was calm—almost too calm, as I learned when he nearly fell asleep on it. I skied holding him by a leash, but besides that, he almost didn’t need my help. He kept his balance, bounced back up when he didn’t, and had almost figured out how to control his own speed by the end. Every time I asked him if he wanted to take a snack break, he asked to “ride chairlift one more time.”

It’s easy to love skiing when it’s perfect. When the conditions are bluebird, the pow is immaculate, and the mountains are glorious, the appeal is obvious, so obvious that even people who can go days (months, even!) without thinking about skiing start to get the itch. But what about when the conditions are bad? When the snow is wet slush and the mountain is a sled hill in farm country, do you still want to go? Maybe it’s the obsessive-compulsive disorder talking, but sometimes I think the acid test of how much you love something is how much you still want to do it when it’s unspectacular. Those middle-school afternoons on buses to one or another snowy bump in Wisconsin left a different impression on all of us. Some of us gave up skiing as adults, a lot of us confined it to the occasional vacation out west, and at least one of us decided to let that first glimpse of a mountain rule the rest of their life. But those are our stories. I’ll wait to see how Rhys writes his.