When I wore a younger man's clothes, I used to love being in the air. I used to search the back side of Mt. Washington BC for steep lines and features I could jump off of. I recall finding two moderately steep lines that were sepearated by some thick trees (too thick to carry much speed through and still avoid the trees). I got the bright idea to turn into the mountain on my right near the end of the first section and jib off of it, clearing the trees. It worked like a charm! The next morning I tried the exact same line. Well the snow was stickier and my wax was not as fresh; the tree tops snagged my skis and tripped me up. I cleared the stand of trees but landed badly and didn't make the required turn upon landing. Instead I got to practice my forearm blocks, fortunately I had the benefit of a dozen or two sapplings bringing me to a stop instead of one big tree.
I then spent a long time in Eastern Canada where there aren't a lot of features to jump off. I still enjoyed being air-borne, and got lots of high speed air off rollers and what not. When Parks became a thing, I did hit the jumps.
Flash forward to a few years ago. Diabetes did a number on my balance. Instead of challenging my balance by walking across the top of Armco barriers along bridges, I'm standing on one foot long enough to put on my pants and boots.
I play it by (middle) ear. I got into the habit of starting each season doing rollers, then very small jumps, and working my way up to the bigger jumps we have at our little hill, which would be small jumps at a big hill.
This year I haven't hit a single jump. The only air I found was skiing along on uneven runs. Not enough time in the season to work up to it in our shortened season. I was about to Last Saturday, but my season just got cut due to a concussion that afternoon ( I now recall I got tripped up trying to do too many short turns in too small a space when my skis didn't quite roll over as fast as I expected - I'm blaming the new boots
).
