A Little Snow-How

Phil Mahre, who runs clinics at Deer Valley with brother Steve, leads a class. The Mahres push skiers to test their limits in search of a comfort zone. (Deer Valley Resort)

At the bottom of a fairly gentle slope, the Mahres and the instructors watched as each of us essentially auditioned our skills. I ended up in one of the intermediate groups, headed by an affable instructor named Bruce, who, it turned out, is originally from Virginia's ski country.

True to his word, Bruce immediately started taking us to the edge of terror in the Mahre fashion. The theory is to find your most efficient comfort zone by pushing you to extremes in various directions. That way, you know where the limits are and where to operate best within them.

To wit: Traversing while leaning as far back on the ski tails without falling backward, and understanding the particular loss of control that ensues and the feeling it produces in your body. Compare that with the feeling you get as you traverse leaning too far forward -- not the same!

Now ski standing straight up. Then crouched down. Turn on outside ski. Inside ski. Ski on one ski at a time.

All the feelings are different. Once familiar with them, when you're skiing and have one of those feelings, you know what you're doing wrong. You spend the next six hours getting familiar with each one.

Forget the surrounding mountains, and the trees, and the lake, and the 50-plus miles of trails slicing across 1,825 acres . . . all you see and think about is the patch of white immediately in front of you.

Afterward, back in the lodge, we attended a lecture on boots. Many skiing problems, the lecturer said, are caused by ill-fitting boots, and most people buy the wrong size. The lecturer just happened to be a salesman in the Deer Valley ski shop -- conveniently located downstairs. But I went ahead and bit -- I stopped in afterward and asked him to check my boot fit. "Lucky you," he said. "Someone actually sold you the right size."

The 'S' Factor

---

The wrong stuff now covered, Day Two began in the breakfast room with Steve Mahre talking about the right stuff. "The quickest way to go from intermediate to advanced is to let the body fall down the hill ahead of the skis, and to maintain that action all the way down," he said. With black marker in hand, he started at the top of a large blank sheet of paper and drew a swaying "S" line -- right, left, right, left, right -- all the way to the bottom. "That's the ski track."

Then, with a red marker, he drew another swaying line, more or less on top of the black line but turning sooner. "That's the body track." The body, he told us, should always start the turn -- by leaning down the hill -- before the skis start to carve. Today we would learn how to apply yesterday's techniques to executing this action.

A ride on the Sultan chairlift afforded a gaze onto the resort's expanse. The Wasatch Mountains, where Deer Valley is located, aren't really a match for the dramatic grandeur of the Rockies. But these 9,000-foot-high peaks have their own charm, with their alternately rolling and rising slopes and pitches, all lined with dense thickets of trees. Add a dazzling sun in a brilliant blue sky and you've got your postcard view.

Stuart and Fiona, a young Australian couple in my group, told me how much they were enjoying themselves. They felt that they'd learned a great deal the day before and hoped to learn more today. But even if they didn't, they said, the experience already had been rewarding: Like me, they'd wanted to be better skiers, but had always thought that a concentrated effort might not be much fun. If they continued to enjoy themselves, they were already planning on returning next year.

Bruce gathered us together at the top of a moderate slope and pointed to a woman we could barely see near the bottom. "She's got a video camera," he said. "We're gonna do what we did yesterday, but put it toward what we learned this morning."