Learning ski touring the old-school way with Colorado Mountain Club

Pete Birkeland, longtime skier and instructor for the Colorado Mountain Club's ski clinic, tours near Arapahoe Pass, west of Nederland.

When the woman teaching you how to ski has had two knee replacements and has qualified for the AARP for a couple of decades, you don't complain when your quads ache -- or when you fall into the snow for the umpteenth time.

This woman was the first of the two seventysomething Colorado Mountain Club members who taught me how to ski during the club's ski touring class. I'm reminiscing on my wobbly moments with these patient folks because this year's class starts at 7 tonight at Neptune Mountaineering.

Two years ago over Thanksgiving weekend, I was slogging downhill in snowshoes when a cross-country skier glided past and out of sight. Shivering and grumpy, I renounced snowshoes on the spot and decided to learn how to ski. When I spotted the CMC course on cross-country skiing in the backcountry the following week, it was a no-brainer. I signed up immediately.

The ski touring course currently includes a lecture at Neptune Mountaineering and two Saturdays out skiing; the first is around Eldora Mountain Resort, and the second in the Indian Peaks, wherever the snow is good. By the second Saturday of my course, I was starting to feel pretty good on skis and was keeping the faceplants into snow to a minimum, so I was moved from my super-new beginners group taught by the nice lady with new knees into Peter Birkeland's quasi-beginners group.

Pete looked like he'd been plucked straight out of Norway and plopped on our trail at Brainard Lake. I was dressed in head-to-toe softshell; Pete wore a wool sweater and tweed knickers with tall socks. My skis glitter; Pete's skis were naked, unpainted wood.

Pete was totally old-school cool. I was smitten.

He took us onto a trail in the woods and said, chuckling, that if we saw a moose, we'd all find out just how fast we could ski. Then he disappeared around a corner and I shuffled, sucked wind and hoped there were no ill-tempered moose nearby.

At the end of the day, the wind picked up, making it too cold to stand around. We skied back and forth on a wide section of the trail to keep warm, and I learned that Pete was a retired University of Colorado geology professor and that his wife teaches the CMC course, too.

"How long have you been skiing, Pete?" I asked.

"Well, I learned to ski when I was 2, so I guess I've been skiing for 70 years," he said. "When you're Norwegian, 2 years is when you learn."

That's right. A 72-year-old had been leaving me -- and my apparently useless youth -- in the dust all day.

Both days I was out there learning to ski, I had plenty of miserable moments. I crashed. I struggled. I slid backwards trying to ski uphill, missed turns and hugged trees.

But I didn't whine. How could I whine when I had these two septuagenarians braving the elements all day to volunteer -- all of the instructors are unpaid volunteers -- to teach newbies like me how to ski?

Because whining was never an option, I was forced into a positive attitude during the clinics, despite frequent faceplants into the snow... and I started to love ski touring.

After the clinics that winter, I skied at Brainard Lake almost every weekend and was grateful to those instructors for sharing their decades of experience. And making me think twice about complaining.

Now I save my whining for ski tours with friends younger than me.