More bad things happened to me due losing vision acuity than any other cause – save me forgetting I am NOT a bird and can’t fly off things like 30 foot cornices or imitating the whole “Chinese Downhill” bit and shooting off a drop-off ramp at 40 or 50 miles an hour and assuming that there was going to be a happy ending…but I digress.

One of my proudest moments though, involved losing my “eyesight” after a crash at the top of Pallavicini (diving off the far cornice in a driving rain is stupid) at Arapahoe Basin on my last ever day of employee skiing out in Colorado. As I was only wearing gloves, a ball cap, sweat pants and a light sweater, getting out of the rain before I got too cold and lost control of my limbs was a real concern.

Side note – it was a beautiful sunny day (in the middle of May) for 3 hours before that and the rain came up on me and a crowd of others real sudden.

The crash completely frosted my glasses and I couldn’t keep the rain from freezing on them about every minute or so and I quickly gave up trying to clear them and concentrated on dodging any sort of a dark silhoette (trees, rocks, lift poles, other skiers) that appeared in the frost.

I couldn’t take off my glasses as the rain would completely blind me and looking for shadows was better than nothing. I was able to get down the Palli face at a fairly decent pace and only fell twice in the process (falling off big moguls I couldn’t see).

A dozen or so folks – mostly employees – had to work their way back to the lift and ride off the mountain as they couldn’t ski in the rain. I got down and out of the rain WAY faster than they did and was in the bar with hot drinks and food at least a half an hour before any of them showed up.

I found out later that a couple of them had talked with the lift operators about sending out ski patrol as they figured I was wrecked somewhere near the top of the mountain…which was funny when they called it in and I was already at the bottom talking to the bottom operator. “Palmer? Why? Uh huh…yeah, it’s pouring out…no, he’s standing right next to me swearing at the weather…he’ll meet you in the bar…says he’ll get first round!”.

I miss skiing.