I get very nervous about this in general. When I was about 5 years old I was skiing with my mom. We were on a green circle and I fell down and lost a ski. She moved me to the side of the trail, fetched my ski, and started helping me get it back on, when a guy who was completely out of control (don’t know if he was new? Drunk? Whatever – I do remember he was in a group of friends) came careening down and crashed into her. It broke her leg and he got pretty hurt as well; I don’t remember what exactly happened to him but he got the neck brace thing on when they took him down. They said that if he had hit me instead I would have quite possibly been seriously– possibly fatally – hurt. I don’t remember a lot about it except just sitting there in the snow for what felt like a very long time, waiting for the ski patrol to get there and being scared more people were going to crash into us. For a long time, I had a lot of guilt and fear around it – I felt like it was my fault for falling down/being in the way, or I worried that my mom had done something wrong by moving me from where I fell, putting us directly in that guy’s path (although of course he wasn’t speeding towards us when we moved there). It took me a long time to believe my mom when she told me that it was his job to be in control of himself – that our responsibility is to ski/fall/get back up safely, and we had taken steps to do that (moving out of the main central path, etc). And also that in general greens on the beginner mountain (this was on Morse at Smuggler's Notch - basically all greens) are not places where you should be speeding down at high, injurious speeds in the first place. It was an accident, and you should always do what you can to prevent an accident, whether you have the “right of way” or not – but we were not at fault just for not preventing it.
I tell my own kids (6 and 9) that story because I want them to fully appreciate how important it is to not put themselves in situations where they can’t be generally in control, and not just in control but respectful. How it’s not just about keeping themselves safe, but about keeping others safe. When you are skiing, you are part of a community made up of everybody on that slope, and you all need to help keep each other safe. If they are skiing in slow areas (designated or not), they are expected to ski slower, even if it’s slower than they want to go or feel is fun. If they want to try a hard new slope, they have a responsibility to the people around them to be clear with their body language where they are going, and to move to the side if they are going to pause. If they feel truly out of control on a slope, it’s almost always better to fall than to keep going. And in general, don’t ski faster than you can stop. (a bit simplified, but the gist is what I’m going for.) Simliar to TNtoTaos, I also teach them that whenever it feels crowded, just pull to the side and stop for a minute (we look uphill before “pulling over,” just like merging). Likewise, if there are people in front of you going slower than you want but you can’t find a good/safe way to get past them, just stop! Take a break, let them get some distance from you, and enjoy the view.
I tell them that just as they have every right to ski at their own pace and take their time to feel in control and safe - and just like they have every right to fall down, because falling is just part of skiing sometimes - other people have those same rights.
I get very weirded out by the bro-y “beer culture” that some people bring to skiing. People talking about pounding a beer on the lift, etc. I love a good beer but I don’t know why you would want to ski even buzzed? Let alone, like, have this bravado about it. I generally think that skiing under the influence should be frowned on as much as driving under the influence, but a lot of times it’s treated as cool or almost as part of the point of going.
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