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Hi. I’m Ben Benton from Flagstaff, Arizona. I believe that you will enjoy my daily journal from Winter Park, Colorado, Ski Resort during Christmas break 1999-2000. I left downtown Flagstaff Wednesday morning, December 22 with my skis, duffle, and laptop computer, and ended up at Snoasis, a lodge midway up the mountain in Winter Park. My journal will continue through the first week of January. You’ll read about Winter Park Ski Resort, Snoasis, Sunspot Lodge, the great people who work here, and anything else I can think of to write about. I’m the author of “National Park Employment Data,” a guide to working in national parks, which is available for purchase on my web site at www.gorp.com/nped/. I’ve been working in national parks and ski areas off and on for over twenty years. Because I want the data in my book to always be fresh, I continually test the concepts, employers, and tips that I provide. I first worked at Winter Park in the late 70s while I was a student at Arizona State University. |
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Wednesday, December 22, 1999 Flagstaff, Arizona, to Moab, Utah Welcome to Ben Benton’s Winter Park Journal. My first trip to Winter Park was in 1978 as a student at Arizona State University. I worked Christmas break at Snoasis Lodge midway up the mountain, which is where I am headed today. I’ll get into that later. I promised myself that I would leave at 6:00 A.M. It’s 2:30 P.M. and I’m leaving Flagstaff in the broad daylight. You can’t believe the piddling things that come up that have to be dealt with before walking out the door. Tonight is special. The full moon is in conjunction with a lunar perigee, where it is closest to the Earth, making it appear 14 percent brighter than normal. The Earth is millions of miles closer to the sun right now than in summer and the sun is striking the moon seven percent stronger. Together, these phenomena give us the brightest, largest moon in 133 years. It won’t happen again for over 100 years. And I’m driving through Monument Valley. I can’t adequately describe what I saw. The monoliths of rock in Monument Valley were eerily shadowed by this magnificent full moon, lighting the landscape but not the sky. It was like a museum exhibit where the objects are spotlighted but the room and ceiling are dark. If it were summer, I would have stopped and lain down by the truck to take it all in. But it was freezing outside and I just drove through the night until I got to Moab. Since southeastern Utah has the population density of Antarctica (and temperatures to match), and there was virtually no traffic, I sort of expected “something” to happen — like a UFO?!? But it didn’t. However, there was quite a show in the sky. Every jet trail was visible — you know, the ice crystals that form from the exhaust that are visible as a white tail — as if it were daylight. I believe several routes pass over southern Utah: San Diego to Chicago, Houston to San Francisco, etc. There must have been eight or ten jet tails just as bright as clouds at noon. I arrived in Moab late and stayed at the Apache Motel, an
inn with the misfortune of being on a side street in a residential
neighborhood, so they only charge $23 for a nicely appointed
room. Avoid staying in Moab in the summer when the rates are
high, if you can, because they now have three taxes on rooms
that amount to nearly 12 percent — more than New York, Washington
DC, or San Francisco.  |
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