Ski Trips: Five Things Every Parent Should Know

We primarily ski at a mountain which markets heavily to boy scout troops and youth groups. What I have witnessed is the stuff of parental nightmares: Non-skiing scout masters or chaperones knocking back beverages while their unsupervised hoard of charges careens insanely down black diamonds; kids on black diamond slopes with their coats unzipped, bare-headed, their Velcro boot straps flapping in the wind, hunched over in a lock kneed snowplow; kids without helmets and little or no skill skiing in the glades (trees).

I confess, I am preaching what I did not initially practice. Simply put, I didn't know what I didn't know and I turned my two sons loose on the slopes with no forethought and no plan. I rather passively figured if ski resorts sold lift tickets for kids, skiing must be safe and simple. And while statistics show that skiing is actually relatively safe, there are myriad risks. Some of them are huge. More often the consequences are financial or merely inconvenient by comparison.

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