Shakespeare said it best, I think: To ski, or not to ski.

This is the question.

If you’ve never skied Iowa, you’ve never quite experienced skiing at its most basic. Listen, any skier gets used to pulling into a resort parking lot and looking up at the mountain, where white rivers of frozen water crystals mark the routes they ache to get at, where chair lifts packed with eager skiers zip ski-ward. At Sundown Mountain, you also enter the parking lot and see the chairlifts, but what you’re seeing is the top of the “mountain.” You could easily be pulling into the lot of your local drugstore. No matter, you think, This is the place to be!

You want to hit the steep stuff. Sundown has this. As you edge over the drop-in, you wonder just what this run will look like. Looking down the Hoover Dam? Well, not quite. Yet for six exhilarating turns, you may just as well be nailing an Olympic downhill run. Then of course the hill flattens out like the chest of a ten year old boy.

Sundown Mountain is not the mountain I learned to ski on, but it is a ski palace of a sort. When you can’t get out to the Rockies, and Chamonix, France, is a fresh, nagging, aching, raw memory filled with bliss, comraderie, near death experinces, red wine, meat cooked on hot stones, and lots of black humor re tripping avalanches, this little piece of Iowa means that skiing goes on.

I ski, therefore I am.

My new ski buddy for the Apple Canyon winter: John Mandala