It is the belief of Wally Dobbs that a ski instructor should first teach his students to have fun, not necessarily to achieve technical perfection.
Dobbs is an instructor at the ski school in Red River, a resort in New Mexico. I skied with him one winter when I visited that resort midway between Taos and Santa Fe. Not many people in the Midwest would rank Red River among what travel agents call Destination Resorts. It's relatively small, somewhat out of the way and frequented by Texans, who consider it their "secret."
But the snow was deep, the scenery superb, and Red River also had as its number one asset, Wally Dobbs. We spent a day skiing together in a group. I don't recall any of the technical tips offered by Dobbs that day, but I do recall him taking us on a detour through the woods to see an old mining shack.
In addition to skiing a lot of vertical feet, we touched a piece of western history. A perfect day of skiing.
"Skiing shouldn't be hard work," insists Dobbs. "If it was work, you would never have met me, because I would have found something else to do for a living."
One of Dobbs' theories is that the skis of today have achieved such a level of technical excellence that they--not the skier-- should do all the work. If you learn to relax, the skis will carry you down the mountain. "I don't teach turning," says Dobbs. "I teach you how to ride something designed to turn."
Dobbs had my ear. I'm not totally against improving my technical ability; it's just that I don't want to work so hard at it under the guidance of a ski instructor that I fail to notice sun glinting on peaks across the valley.
I've had a number of instructors, good and bad. The worst was at a resort in eastern Canada. During a pressure-laden day of instruction, he attempted to recreate me as a skier, using every trick of the Professional Ski Instructors Association handbook. I could almost see him flipping the pages of his manual as we worked our way down the mountain. And it was work. By the end of the day, I could barely remember which way to point my skis.
Unlike that instructor, Dobbs doesn't claim omniscience. "When I think I know all the answers," says Dobbs, "that's the day when I should switch from instruction to selling lift tickets."
Dobbs has already switched jobs once. Originally, he worked for an advertising and print company in Dallas, spending weekends and vacations commuting to ski resorts north in New Mexico. "I finally figured out I had it backwards," says Dobbs. "I should work at the ski resort and take vacations in Dallas."
Dobbs prides himself on never missing a day of skiing, between the day the ski lifts start humming in November and the rocks start peeking through the snow in April. In a typical winter, Dobbs will ski 135 consecutive days.
During the off-season, Dobbs serves as a roving ambassador for the sport and Red River Resort, touring the country in a 1956 Willis station wagon with wooden sides that he claims is now on its third engine, won't go faster than 50 mph, and broke down 17 times last year.
A sign on the side says, "Ask me about Red River."
Dobbs eschews the major city ski shows, preferring smaller towns, not visited by the marketing representatives for Vail and Aspen. "I'll pull into Jackson, Mississippi with skis on the roof in July," he says, "and people will ask me what I've got up there. I'll hand them a brochure."
Dobbs believes in first promoting the sport of skiing, next the state of New Mexico, and only then Red River. "A lot of ski people disagree with that approach," he says, "but we're in an industry with 1 per cent annual growth, and we've got to teach people that skiing is fun, not something you do to display your technical ability."
That philosophy suits me. I don't want to go fast or bang through mogul fields. Just throw me off the end of the chairlift and point me to the part of the mountain where the snow is smooth and the sky blue above it.
If you're ever in Red River, look up Wally Dobbs. Maybe he'll show you that mining shack deep in the woods. That's guaranteed to make you a better skier.
Copyright © 1995 by Hal Higdon. All rights reserved. Requests to reprint will be considered.
HAL HIGDON, a freelance writer from Michigan City, Indiana, was the 1995 winner of the North American Ski Journalist Association's Harold S. Hirsch Award for Excellence in Ski Writing. Hal can be reached by email at: higdon@adsnet.com