Appleton couple enjoys life on slopes

By TOM LAVENTURE

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Ironwood Township — When winter arrives Fran Frye and Mark Stoeger leave Appleton, Wisconsin for the slopes of the Upper Peninsula.

The two rent a condo and along with season passes they are ski patrol volunteers at Big Powderhorn Mountain Resort.

“It’s our first day at Powderhorn but not our first day skiing this year,” Frye said Monday. “We ski patrol at Pine Mountain and we were there a little while yesterday.”

The conditions were perfect, she said. The surface grabs nicely and doesn’t feel icy. There is a beautiful corduroy on it and the staff did a nice job on the slopes, she said.

“It’s beautiful up here,” Frye said. “The snow is perfect.”

As for volunteering, Frye said there is one full time professional ski patrol staff on the slope and as many as 30 volunteers who can be available on a regular basis. Since they have season passes already the resorts often gives them day and weekend passes they can give friends who come up to visit, she said.

A volunteer ski patrol has more responsibility now, Stoeger said. There is training and classes and a lot of first aid and medical things to learn.

“They upped the game,” Stoeger said.

Frye said the couple are “generally helpful people anyway” and so to have some knowledge and a radio to use when somebody needs help is just a way to feel useful while having fun. There is a lot to know and she said she didn’t realize how much she had learned until watching ski patrol movies and television.

“We say, ‘you’re not supposed to do that!” she said.

Stoeger and Frye said they prefer to practice technique or do as many turns as they can while coming down the hill. A lot of people enjoy the speed and like to scare themselves coming down the hill like a rocket but it’s as challenging and arguably as fun to do turns, side slips and pivots, she said.

“It gives you something to strive for so it’s not how fast can I go without dying, it’s what can I do with the surface to be in control?” Frye said. “It takes a lot of control to throw that many turns on that face.”

Coming down the ricochet run offers a sense of flying, Stoeger said. Not for speed but for making big, wide turns from side to side on a nice long run.

“If you start to get bored, take a lesson and learn something,” Frye said. “You can have more fun out here trying to do stuff, trying to make turns, and trying to do different things.”

Frye said she observed a ski patrol class for navigating ski bumps with a toboggan in Iron Mountain last season. She plans to take the class this year.

“You need to know what to do with those bumps,” she said. “Are you trying to ski around them, trying to ski on top of them or sliding over them? You need to know what to do.”