Not Bad for an April Fool

Some of the best times are the off-times.

If you time it right, the off-season, or the near-off season, can be a great time to ... well, do a lot of things. Hotel rates in resort areas can be cheaper, the crowds are smaller, and sometimes there's a delicious ambiance that you won't find any other time.

You can see this principle at work in golf, for example. It's easy to think of golf as a summer event, or (since the Masters tournament is coming up this week), a spring and summer event. Yet my favorite time to golf is in the fall, when "a good walk spoiled" is a fantastic way to savor the crisp air and foliage.

In the same way, nearly off-season skiing and snowboarding has its own delights, as I've written before.

I spent much of yesterday at Spirit Mountain, in Duluth, Minnesota. When talking with one of the staffers there, I joked that it was appropriate that my last day in the Midwest would have been April Fool's day. After all, some people might think that only a fool would venture out to the slopes on April 1.

But the conditions were pretty good. The snow was of course mashed potato-like in many places, but it was only partly, not totally lumpy. The edges of the runs had shrunk, of course, but the too-warm-to-slide-on patches of snow were (for the most part) easily avoidable.

If you like getting up speed in the halfpipe, it was a bad day. But for someone who likes to try it out from time to time but is cautious about getting too much speed, it was a great day. And it was also a good day for cruising, or, as my riding partners like to do, bomb it down the hill.

A bonus feature of Duluth is that you can some good water views as well as some birding. A couple of times we saw a bald eagle, and the view of St. Louis bay, and Lake Superior were fantastic.