For a sample of the things you might need to deal with just to make it down a run in one piece:
- Predicting where other skiers and boarders will be over the course of the next several seconds, which involves watching how they're behaving on the slope in terms of turning or (in)consistency, their speed generally, the likelihood that they're going to eat shit in a manner that puts you at risk, and whether they're at risk of ~catching air~ β and, if so, how high off the ground they're going to be.
- You're approaching a bump at a higher speed than you'd like to be going at! You now get to determine, from your own speed, weight, the snow conditions, your skis' performance characteristics, and even where you are on the run side-to-side and what hazards might be in your path, whether to attempt to turn while going over this rise or not.
- Someone's flying past you at some ungodly speed, and they've also decided that they're going to do Big Turnsβ’ all the way across the run, despite having had an opportunity to pull themself away from you as many as ten seconds ago. You now get to calculate whether the leftward peak of their current turn will stop short of your current trajectory or not, seeing as they've already driven you so far to the edge of the run that you're having to adjust your footing every tenth of a second to make sure the edges of the moguls you're brushing against don't throw you into a crash and subsequently into a treewell.
- The only thing between you and getting into the lift line is a pack of twenty white people from Utah, all wearing immaculate new Arc'teryx ski clothes, eighteen of which you're sure you recognise from photos taken at the J6 riot. At least one of them is wearing their clothes sufficiently wrong that you can see a bit of temple garment peeking out. The lift is a six-pack, so the line is already a free-for-all. You could burn just enough speed with a quick bit of sliding that you could safely cut through the loosely-packed crowd and fit in with some pleasant, not chuddy tourists, but on the other hand, you could use that speed to cut over to the singles line and have an 80% chance of ending up on a chair with some locals who seem pleasant, other than the fact that they'd totally talk your ear off about how badly Vail screwed this place up, but also how badly Fortress did before that, and also how badly Intrawest wrecked things before getting bought out by Fortress, and also they probably have some opinions about Nippon Cable or the Garibaldi Lift Company or whatever the hell.
- Whoops! You took a wrong turn onto a mountain bike trail. You're now having to manage your kinetic and potential energy like never before, aiming your skis with more precision than, well, is even possible with skis as opposed to mountain bike tyres. You are thinking about your position on the hill in tenths of seconds, considering your trajectory in arcminutes and your placement upon finishing each jump down to the centimetre.
