I'm sure there are pleasures more sublime than being whisked to the top of a mountain, to coast again and again down a white carpet of undulating terrain, endlessly renewed and discovered underfoot as if for the first time. There has got to be a comparable rush; just that I've not yet found it.
It's a problem that gives pause, but not to the degree of relinquishing the thrill.
The parking lot is filled with gas guzzlers, mostly from out of state. Condos sprout up like mushrooms, defying the evidence of a housing crisis. Huge swaths of national wilderness are clear-cut, and the chair lifts are populated by Lycra and Gore-Texed people ranging from just a few years old to squadrons of octogenarians, each and all wearing hundreds of dollars of garments, accessories, and ephemera, and sporting at least that much, sometimes many more times as much, in gear.
But the challenge, the skills, the delight that is derived from this activity is transcendent. It's a riddle to me. An activity that is so rapacious environmentally, yet so satisfying on the plane of earthy experience, what can be done? And now, with massive high tech snow-making efforts, and multi-million dollar ad campaigns, the activity is hardly affordable to most natives who live in the very region this artful sport takes place.
And talk about garish, decadent, and surreal; there is an indoor ski area in Dubai.
I'm torn, truly. I love to ride. It's my salvation in the long harsh winter. But it now seems also the very essence of indulging in an unsustainable economy in a peak-oiled, globally-warmed world. What's a conscientious dude to do?