Dirk Beal’s Big Five-0

For a long time, Dirk Beal, director of sales at Deer Valley Mountain Resorts wanted to celebrate his big “Five-0” by skiing 50,000 vertical feet on that special day. To make sure this milestone would be conducted in the proper way he turned to me since I had done something similar the year before. Overnight, I had made a deal with the Vatican to guarantee that ski-traffic controllers - up in heaven - would prevent embarrassing collisions between us and valuable Deer Valley guests, in spite of a heavy cloud cover. In exchange, I was asked by Pope Benedict to act as a pacesetter and validate the results.

For this occasion, the Holly See had provided me with a special, long coat, just like a Monsignor, and given me the “Massimo Vertidroppi” namesake. At 8:30 am we met at the Snow Park base lodge and began to work. The weather was cold and snowy and I secretly wondered why in the world Dirk had chosen that very day to come to the world, but that was obviously a bit late…By the time we arrived at the Sultan Express lift, our legs were still cottony and the first run wasn't quite up to snuff. At that point, and unbeknownst to me, Dirk called Olympian Heidi Voelker, Ambassador of Skiing for the Deer Valley Resort, to come and give us a pep talk in order to get us going. She eventually showed up, rode the lift four times with us and gave us some invaluable pointers like “the fastest route between top and bottom of ‘Sultan’ is a straight line,” or something like that, and watched us evolve, correcting us as we slid down. After a short “pit stop” behind some frozen evergreen trees, we barely had time to eat our lunches and drink whatever wasn’t frozen inside our thermos bottles. As time went on and as the 50,000, then 60,000 vertical markers passed, Dirk Beal became hooked on the mission and didn’t want to call it a day. Deep inside, I was scared that he would take my suggestion to finish the day night skiing on nearby Payday Lift in Park City... At about 4:25 pm we finally stopped and had shattered my previous record, by reaching 85,590 vertical feet. Upon taking his skis off, our birthday boy nonchalantly declared: “This is what I call a full ski day!”

To enlarge, click on table

Happy Big Five-O, Dirk!