I have been working with clients in Whistler and Vancouver, BC, Canada, for the last week or so. Along the way, I skied for three days at Whistler and Blackcomb (click on the picture and map – the angle of the steeps is 52 degreees!). I have never seen steeps, chutes and couloirs (steep chutes) like this in my life – thank goodness I was skiing with people who knew what they were doing, some of whom were better than me and took good care of me! (The map in the two squares – Spanky’s Ladder on Blackcomb (left square) and Couloir Extreme in Seventh Heaven on Whistler (right square) is where we skied). The mountians cover 8,000 acres, huge powder and views forever! It was amazing – three days of adrenaline. (Click on the pictures to enlarge them).

As I watched the moguls I realized an interesting thing: skiers need to “read’ the shadow of the mogul – it is the shadow that provides definition so that one can asses the terrain safely and navigate the bumps competently. If it were all shadow, there would be no defintion. If it were all light, there would be no definition either. Just like life. We need the light and the dark – the yin and the yang – in order to make sense of the whole – the ONEness of existence. So the moguls were, for me, a metaphor for life. A lesson learned in the mountians.