- Carol Porter is 91 years old and wanted to spend her last day on skis with three generations of her family.
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She falls a few times, but snow is falling too, so when she lands, the ground is soft. And nothing — not the cold nor wind nor even the falling — can keep her from what this day of skiing will be — her last.
Carol Porter is 91 years old and wanted to spend her last day on skis with three generations of her family: daughter, grandson and great-granddaughter.
So that is exactly what she did.
“I’d rather fall the entire way down the mountain than take my skis off and ride down on a ski patrol sled,” Porter said after a few tumbles on the Bonanza trail at Pico Ski Resort.
It didn’t seem to faze Porter one bit that her 6-year-old great-granddaughter, Maria, zipped past her shouting, “Hurry up, you guys.”
The firecracker great-grandmother practically grew up on skis.
She was part of the original Otter Ski Patrol, established in 1936 — a member of the Junior League. She was one of the few girls on the ski team in high school, even winning several races by using her own skiing strategy — the snowplow.
“I actually won races by snowplowing the whole way down,” Porter said, laughing at the distant but still vivid memories. “All of the other girls were daring. They went too fast, and crashed when it was icy, but I snowplowed and stayed in control. And, sometimes, I won that way.”
Porter reflects back on the days when the ski boots were shorter, the skis were longer and they didn’t wear helmets.
Which is why, on her day spent at Pico with her family, she keeps rearranging the helmet she has rented from the equipment shop in the base lodge.
“It’s hard to get used to this stuff,” she said, clutching her wooden ski poles. “Everything is different.”
And everything is different.
Back when Porter was in high school, she bought tickets for individual lift rides up the mountain.
“(It was) a lot like how you buy tickets for a ride at the fair,” she said.
And the skis broke easily because they were made of wood.
“All you had to do was crash into a snowbank and your ski snapped in half,” she said.
Other things snapped in half while skiing, too.
Her now late husband, Burt, broke his leg skiing on Mount Washington. It resulted in an amputation and a wooden leg to match his wooden skis.
Porter said her husband was such a fan of skiing that he jury-rigged his fake leg to fit into his ski boot, and the winter after his accident, he was back on the slopes, his young wife by his side and a wooden leg in his ski.
“It weighed a ton and was awkward,” she said, “but he had phenomenal balance and was very determined.”
Jamie Dritschilo, Porter’s daughter, said she has a distinct memory of a family day spent on the mountain.
It was the day her father’s fake leg popped off.
“Suddenly, mom was skiing down to the base lodge, asking for a screwdriver so she could put her husband’s leg back on,” she said, laughing.
But the little bumps along the way with the fake leg didn’t keep the skiing pair from finding other little adventures.
At one point, Porter and her husband coached the Norwich University Men’s Ski Team.
“The boys on the team were disgusted to have a woman helping them out,” she said. “But once they saw I was a good skier, it more or less became a cool joke, and they stopped being so sullen all of the time.”
Jamie Dritschilo was with her mother when she got back on skis for the last time at Pico.
It was the first time she had been on skis in almost 20 years, Porter said.
After Porter’s husband’s health started to decline in the 1980s, he was forbidden to ski, so she stopped, too, but she wanted to get back on the slopes just one last time.
Dressed only in wind pants because she was “too busy falling to get cold,” the feisty 91-year-old took her last turns down the mountain that she had started out on.
“Maybe next time,” she said, “I’ll try snowboarding.”
bryanna.allen @rutlandherald.com
