The tribes and cultures of the world celebrate the New Year in different manners and on widely different dates. Our tribe celebrates the first of the year on the opening day of Fernie Alpine Resort. This year we had the celebration of the decade. Make that two decades. Not since the early 2000s has FAR opened with this much accumulated snow and this amount of open terrain.

Like a long hibernating brood of cicadas, the town showed. The population crawled out of the snow, brought by the cold, by promise of bottomless powder. At 8:45 this morning, the traffic was bumper-to-bumper almost a third of the way back to the new Lizard Creek Bridge from the hill.

At 9AM, with the spinning lifts, the shouts began.

By 2PM the Griz Bar was rollicking like a February powder day. (And remember for just a moment, it is still November, only one day after American Thanksgiving). The conditions were epic. And epic conditions beat us up early in the season. The Griz Bar called, siren like.

More parents played hooky with their kids than on any 20cm day. No notes needed. Gone. Gone skiing. Duh. Today, in one single day, the Tribe fully recovered from a couple of lackluster years and is rocking the big one ahead.

Hoist a beer. Grab a file. Heat up that iron. Time to tune those skis (for the first time in a while). Get ‘em dialed. This year’s going to be one for the record books. It’s started and is not going to stop.

Yahoo!!

Keith Liggett has a writing career with one foot in the literary and the other seeking a different angle within traditional journalism. Read more from Keith.